Sex and Terror

It would seem to be only fair, now that I have presented poems that combine sex with a disturbing edge, and from a specifically male point of view, to do the same from a female perspective. It is more difficult for me to talk about, because I do not presume to know how this sort of material feels for a woman (not that I know how it feels to be a stalker, either.) Nevertheless, it is important to demonstrate that poets of both genders are being drawn to write about sex in this way. I do not necessarily know why we are seeing an outbreak of writing that reflects sex and terror, but that it fits under the rubric I have created seems beyond question. The poems I would like to feature today belong to Boston's Mary Walker Graham, another fave for me. Graham's poems are every bit as creepy as Todd Swift's, with the difference that the protagonist seems either to be a sort of victim, or in the process of self-castigation. Graham veers more towards the straight Confessional than Swift does, but always with an added dimension and depth that places her (to my eyes) squarely within the confines of post-avant. The following is a prose poem, it is entitled A Pit, A Broken Jaw, A Fever:

When I say pit, I'm thinking of a peach's. As in James and the Giant, as in: the night has many things for a girl to imagine. The way the flesh of the peach can never be extricated, but clings- the fingers follow the juice. The tongue proceeds along the groove. Dark peach: become a night cavern- an ocean's inside us- a balloon for traveling over. When I said galleons of strong arms without heads, I meant natives, ancient. I meant it takes me a long time to get past the hands of men; I can barely get to their elbows. How a twin bed can become an anchor. How a balloon floating up the stairwell can become a person. Across the sea of the hallway then, I floated. I hung to the flourescent fixtures in the bathroom, I saw a decapitated head on the toilet. I'll do anything to keep from going in there. I only find the magazines under the mattress, the Vaseline in the headboard cabinet. A thought so hot you can't touch it. A pit. A broken jaw. A fever.

This poem practically oozes creepiness. Among the aspects I find most notable: the way that Graham's protagonist self-infantilizes (regarding herself not as a woman but as a "girl"), the imagery that conflates the sexual with the horrific (Vaseline butting against a decapitated head, broken jaws, fevers), and the intimation that what is at the heart of this confrontation is some sort of compulsive relationship (the magazines do not seem to belong to the protagonist, and are, we assume, dirty.) Yet the poem intrigues because, despite its intimations, it never abandons the first person singular. Whomever the "you" happens to be, we never see them, they are never addressed, and the poem contains no "Other." There is solipsism at work, that cuts the implied "you" down to size; the narrator may be involved in an unhealthy relationship, but the primary feeling we get is one of self-loathing and self-disgust. The generalized phrases that are addressed to men (it takes me a long time to get past the hands of men, etc) serve to illustrate the narrator's alienation from whatever specific man is involved in the situation. There is also an unlikely quality to Graham's metaphors: what exactly could "balloon" imply, in this context? How can it be connected to the "peach" that Graham puts it up against? At one point, Graham creates a metaphoric chain, all meant to represent the same thing: dark peach, night cavern, ocean, balloon. The most obvious interpretation is that the metaphor is meant to signify the female sexual organ. However, the metaphoric chain is distorted, disturbing, and weird. It would seem incongruous that all these signifiers could be referring to the same thing. You have to stretch to allow the metaphoric chain to work, just as Graham stretches to convey what she wants to convey, which is equally brutal and surreal. The following poem, Double, has roughly the same feel:

Here is a box of fish marked tragedy.
Is it different from the dream

in which your alter ego kills the girl?
You are the same, and everyone knows it,

whether tracing the delicate lip of the oyster shell,
or sharpening your blade in the train car.

The marvelous glint is the same.
Though you think you sleep, you wake

and walk into the hospital, fingering
each instrument, opening each case with care.

The scales fall away with a scraping motion.
You are the surgeon and you are the girl.

Whether you lie like feathers on the pavement,
or coolly pocket your equipment, and walk away...

You are the same; and you are the same.
You only sleep to enter the luminous cave.

I do not think it would be an exaggeration to say that this poem places itself in a realm on infantile sexuality. Yet that it is written from an adult perspective gives it a kind of double edge. If there is terror here, it is terror of the protagonist's own sexual power. The pleasure for the reader is in trying to understand the different levels of self-evaluation that are going on, and how they tie in to the narrator's sense of herself. It reminds me of Plath's Lady Lazarus, but even darker, (like Swift) more clinical, more perverse, and much more blatantly sexual. As in A Pit, there is a level of sexual solipsism going on that becomes a maze, in and of itself. There is also a level on which the poem exteriorizes its own discomfort through the use of "gross" imagery: box(es) of fish, blades, surgeons. What is the nature of the operation? What necessitates it? The poem is given added depth because it is presented in the second person: not "I" but "you." It takes on the quality of a narrator talking to herself about herself, and makes the poem an exercise in self-consciousness, more so than the first one. I find this compelling because it picks up the tone of Confessional poetry but puts it through a new kind of light filter, a new kind of self-conscious awareness, rooted in sex and terror. What Graham sees as "Double" could be a split between her body and her mind, or between her sexuality and her intellect, or even between herself and an Other. Whatever it is, it has left her in pieces, and the poem seems to be an attempt to put herself back together again. Both of these poems present a consistent persona: a polymorphously perverse girl-woman lost in the never-land of her own body. It would be difficult to get more edgy than that.

On the other hand, if someone were to say to me that these poems are somewhat gratuitous, I would have a hard time denying it. Post-avant, as I have defined it, does not necessarily thrive on understatement. Its natural tendency seems to be to make big statements, or, failing that, to be as incisive as possible. Brooklyn's Borrowed House poems may strike the nicest balance between understatement and edge. With Mary Walker Graham, what we are seeing is almost a kind of Mannerism, with everything exaggerated for effect. With those who have a taste for intensity and/or extremity, these poems will work; for those who prefer things that are more laconic, less grandiose, they may appear absurd. I do not particularly mind poets who make big statements; as long as they are done with panache, and without a lot of fat on them, they are enjoyable to me. Infantilism is another issue altogether, and one that could be problematic. I will only say that the manner in which Graham presents her infantilism is imaginative enough to be convincing and compelling to me. There is a starkness to her imagery that has a strange power. Between Brooklyn and Graham, we see that post-avant is capacious enough to contain different versions of female sexuality. I would like to hope that "edge" is broad enough to contain multitudes and specific enough to actually signify something as well. If I am doing my job, it will be.