Thinking Sex: Representing Desire and Difference
A Feminist and Gender Studies Course
Bryn Mawr College, Fall, 2002

Questions? email me or post.

One way I thought these articles related particularly well to our class, which is focused on putting sex into language, is that the articles encourage the same thing, in a way.
Some questions I would like to pose:
1. How do these articles stay on that theme of putting sex into language?
2. What is significant about putting sex into language before your God (whatever/whoever that may be)?
3. How does articulation of sex in prayer help sex and help prayer?
4. How would you define a spiritual connection between two people as opposed to a sexual one? How does each connection enhance the other?
5. God as a creator -how does this role make God inherently sexual? Does reproduction(creation) have a strong connection to sex here? How is sexuality reproductive beyond the realm of "making babies"?

4 zayd/ absences

in yr/absence
my fingers
b
come
yr/
mouth
exploding
b
tween
my legs
as
insistent
as this
late evening
moon
claiming its
quiet place
crying over
brooklyn
or else
like the
electronic lock
slamming u away
after the
11:00
count

by Asha Bandele

http://www.americanpoems.com/poets/annesexton/rapunzel.shtml

This is the part of the poem that captures that image for me:

A woman
who loves a woman
is forever young.
The mentor
and the student
feed off each other.
Many a girl
had an old aunt
who locked her in the study
to keep the boys away.
They would play rummy
or lie on the couch
and touch and touch.
Old breast against young breast...
Let your dress fall down your shoulder,
come touch a copy of you
for I am at the mercy of rain,
for I have left the three Christs of Ypsilanti
for I have left the long naps of Ann Arbor
and the church spires have turned to stumps.
The sea bangs into my cloister
for the politicians are dying,
and dying so hold me, my young dear,
hold me...

The yellow rose will turn to cinder
and New York City will fall in
before we are done so hold me,
my young dear, hold me.
Put your pale arms around my neck.
Let me hold your heart like a flower
lest it bloom and collapse.
Give me your skin
as sheer as a cobweb,
let me open it up
and listen in and scoop out the dark.
Give me your nether lips
all puffy with their art
and I will give you angel fire in return.
We are two clouds
glistening in the bottle galss.
We are two birds
washing in the same mirror.
We were fair game
but we have kept out of the cesspool.
We are strong.
We are the good ones.
Do not discover us
for we lie together all in green
like pond weeds.
Hold me, my young dear, hold me.

They touch their delicate watches
one at a time.
They dance to the lute
two at a time.
They are as tender as bog moss.
They play mother-me-do
all day.
A woman
who loves a woman
is forever young.

...

Anne Sexton according to Alicia Ostriker:

When she began taking classes in poetry and meeting poets, Sexton discovered another group who spoke "language." "I found I belonged to the poets, that I was real there." As Diane Middlebrook remarks, what Sexton means by "language" is something compressed, elliptical, metaphoric. "Schizophrenics use language this way, and so do poets: 'figurative language' is the term Sexton might have used here, except she meant to indicate that the crucible of formation was urgent need." Clearly, too, "language" in Sexton's account is what people speak when they are free of the censor's invisible veil of ordinary intercourse; "language" is intimacy, authenticity, love in a loveless world; it is what the inner self uses to communicate with other inner selves.

This to me is a good way to think of Conway's argument (ah, rhetoric!) about poetic strategy. Conway claims that poetic expression is "empathic, associative, and identificatory." Poetic expression is a discourse that forms a bridge between the unspeakable/unfathomable and the demand for the expression of such, yet it remains intimate and within the writer's realm. This is not to say that it can't be misinterpreted, but as an artist the writer grants permission (Power) to access this discourse instead of submitting to the greater discourse/language policed by society. Poetic expression is therefore self-affirming and potentially more accurate than other currently available language for sex.

Harmony Ideology: Justice and Control in a Zapotec Mountain Village
by Laura Nader. Nader is an legal anthropologist at U.C. Berkeley.

Good luck in your work,
Andrea

Although I challenged Mary on her failure to suggest an alternative language for talking about sex in the courtroom, for her "retreat" from the public language of law into the language of poetry, I also (inconsistently? how's this for an example of a divided subjectivity?) reveled (could you tell?) in our end-of-session poetry reading in the darkened classroom.

Here are the two poems I read:

Plumstone

eating a plum
I tongue the tight skin
drawn seam
that halves this globed
whole in two
it's midnight
blue outside
but when I bite in
bursting
with wet red flesh
the juice dripping down
my fingers sweet
sticky sticky
sweet pulp
engorged I
fill my mouth
eat it down
eat it down
all the way to the
plumstone.

Becky Birtha in The Forbidden Poems

After Love

Afterward, the compromise
Bodies resume their boundaries.

These legs, for instance, mine.
Your arms take you back in.

Spoons of our fingers, lips
admit their ownership.

The bedding yawns, a door
blows aimlessly ajar

and overhead,a plane
singsongs coming down.

Nothing is changed, except
there was a moment when

the wolf, the mongering wolf
who stands outside the self

lay lightly down, and slept.

Maxine Kumin

Cartographies of Silence --Adrienne Rich (from "The Dream of a Common Language 1978"
1.

A conversation begins
with a lie. And each

speaker of the so-called common language feels
the ice-floe split, the drift apart

as if powerless, as if up against
a force of nature

A poem can begin
with a lie. And be tornup.

A conversation has other laws
recharges itself with its own

false energy. Cannot be torn
up. Infiltrates our blood. Repeats itself.

Inscribes with its unreturning stylus
the isolation it denies.

2.
The classical music station
playing hour upon hour in the apartment

the picking up and picking up
and again picking up the telephone

The syllables uttering
the old script over and over

The loneliness of the liar
living in the formal network of the lie

twisting the dials to drown the terror
beneath the unsaid word

3.

The technology of silence
The rituals, etiquette

the blurring of terms
silence not absence

of words or music or even
raw sounds

Silence can be a plan
rigorously executed

the blueprint to a life

It is a presence
it has a history a form

Do not confuse it
with any kind of absence

4.

How calm, how inoffensive these words
begin to seem to me

though begun in grief and anger
Can I break through this film of the abstract

without wounding myself or you
ther is enough pain here

This is why the classical or the jazz music station plays?
to give a ground of meaning to our pain?

5.

The silence that strips bare:
In Dreyer's Passion of Joan

Falconetti's face, hair shorn, a great geography
mutely surveyed by the camera

If there were a poetry where this could happen
not as blank spaces or as words

stretched like a skin over meanings
but as silence falls at the end

of a night through which two people
have talked till dawn

6.

The scream
of an illegitimate voice

It has ceased to hear itself, therefore
it asks itself

"How do I exist?

This was the silence I wanted to break in you
I had questions but you would not answer

I had answers but you could not use them
This is uuseless to you and perhaps to others

7.

It was an old theme even for me:
Language cannot do everything--

chalk it on teh walls where teh dead poets
lie in their mausoleums

If at the will of the poet the poem
could turn into a thing

a granite flank laid bare, a lifted head
alight with dew

If it could simply look you in the face
with naked eyeballs, not letting you turn

till you, and I who long to make this thing,
were finally clarified together in its stare

8.

No. Let me have this dust,
these pale clouds dourly lingering, these words

moving with ferocious accuracy
like the blind child's fingers

or the newborn infant's mouth
violent with hunger

No one can give me, I have long ago
taken this method

whether of bran pouring from the loose-woven sack
or of the bunsen-flame turned low and blue

If from time to time I envy
the pure annunciations to the eye

the visio beatifica
if from time to time I long to turn

like the Eleusinian hierophant
holding up a simple ear of grain

for return to the concrete and everlasting world
what in fact I keep choosing

are these words, these whispers, conversations
from which time after time truth breaks moist and green.

Her Pear
by Ali T.

I
Hunger so
She offers me fruit
Smooth and ripe
Brilliant color
Stem erect and firm
Milky white flesh
Delicious on my tongue
Tender, succulent
Satisfying
Her pear

I am still digesting class today, so for now, i will just submit a poem.

this poem popped into my head when i heard anne read "After Love" at the

end of class today.





Poem No. 3

i gather up

each sound 

you left behind 

and stretch them 

on our bed.

           each nite 

i breathe you

and become high. 



                         -sonia sanchez 



the poems that have been submitted have a lot of food imagery, playing up

on taste.  there has also been a lot of description about the body.  so, i

thought i would go a different route... i love this poem bc its focus is

concentrated on sound and scent.  yum! 

 

enjoy! 

The Sea and the Shore -- Yehuda Amichai

The sea and the shore are always next to each other
Both want to learn to pseak, to learn to say
one word only. The sea wants to say "shore"
and the shore "sea." They draw closer,
millions of years, to speech, to saying
that single word. When the sea says "shore"
and the shore "sea,"
redemtion will come to the world,
the world will return to chaos.

Oh! And a shameless plug- COME SEE HAMLET'S SHORTS IN GOODHARDT MUSIC ROOM, FRIDAY AND SATURDAY AT 8PM!!!!!!!!! Very funny, very short (less than an hour)!!! See you there:)

And sarah's question...

I communicate physically. With friends, lovers, family, anyone. Physical. I am really easy to read when you look at my body language and facial expressions.

Thunder Love
By ruffy

Thunder Love
Tie me up
To the rings above your bed
Here I lie
I await you
Thunder Love
Scratch me
With your nails and your teeth
My body arches
Your delirious lover
Your devoted slave
Blindfold me
Use your satin scarve
I don't want to see
Rather feel
Your touch
Candle wax
As hot as my skin
Trickle it down my breasts
You're a master
Tangible lightning
Calm me
You're a threatening storm
And I am drowning
In your rain
Thunder Love

Also I just wanted to share a few thoughts from class. It was discused how Anita Hill's words became pornography through her testimony. Then when Anne read "Plumstone" in class as an alternative testimony. I thought it was interesting that no one mentioned this: I felt that the poem was more pornographic in its imagery then the words she probably used. To me there is something more intimate and sexual about poetry then the usual language of the court room and that for this additional reason the poetry would not be a good language for the courtroom.

later
Jess

Her breast is fit for pearls,
But I was not a `Diver' -
Her brow is fit for thrones
But I have not a crest.
Her heart is fit for home -
I - a Sparrow - build there
Sweet twigs and twine
My perennial nest.
~Emily Dickinson

Decade
When you came, you were like red wine and honey,
And the taste of you burnt my mouth with its sweetness.
Now you are like morning bread,
Smooth and pleasant.
I hardly taste you at all for I know your savour,
But I am completely nourished.
~Amy Lowell

Raw Pink
Jan Hastillo Brown
(11/06/02)

This is how it feels, exciting the raw pink.
Slow, slow at first, little spark of thought
Ignites into torrid fantasy.
Deliciously, tortously slow,
Middle finger slides across sensitive skin,
Dipping into warm pink folds,
Circles of arousal,
Hips lifting in supplication to the
Goddess of the hand.
Faster now, reaching for the
Firm, waxy bud.
Blossom opens its petal to receive a stroke,
Sticks out her moist tongue to taste the fingertip.
Raw pink, slow-roasted,
Tender hot flesh oozing spicy juices.
Comes now, comes now
No awareness except the rapture,
Imploding red blossoms behind clenched eyes,
Nipples massaged, tweaked to fullness,
Barely touchable in their ecstatic extension.
Thighs and cheeks soaking into the sheets,
Sticky, heated sweetness-musk,
Gift from the raw pink.
Pulse beat spreads throughout,
To lips and eyelids from still-throbbing bud,
Coursing up through fluttering belly
To distended nipples, to lips pursed for breath,
Raw pink sleeps satiated.

This is how it feels.....

(c)2002 by Jan Hastillo Brown

Return to Course Home Page