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Investor's Business Daily decided to run a wonderfully ignorant editorial on Elizabeth Alexander's upcoming inaugural poem. Check that. It's not even on her inaugural poem, but on another poem of hers, "The Venus Hottentot."
IBD decides to skewer such lines as
"Her genitalia will float inside a labeled pickling jar . . . "
"Monsieur Cuvier investigates between my legs, poking, prodding . . . "
"Since my own genitals are public I have made other parts private."
and contrasts these with (a substantially briefer excerpt from) Maya Angelou's inaugural poem: "The dinosaur, who left dry tokens . . . ."
I'll leave it to other bloggers and pundits and poets to defend or attack the quality of the verse - a task that requires a larger sample than the one provided in the article. What pisses me off is the insistence that Alexander's verse is too dirty for public consumption. It's not even the implication that because she has written poetry that involves the word "genitalia" she will read such a poem. It's that such poetry is somehow out of place or uncouth.
The article snidely adds scare quotes around the phrase "swearing-in," belying a misunderstanding of swearing. You won't encounter a damn or a God damn or a fuck or a shit in Alexander's poem. No, you'll find repetitions of that clinical term "genitalia."
IBD all but fawns over Frost. But what would the writers do with this bit?:
PUTTING IN THE SEED
You come to fetch me from my work to-night
When supper's on the table, and we'll see
If I can leave off burying the white
Soft petals fallen from the apple tree
(Soft petals, yes, but not so barren quite,
Mingled with these, smooth bean and wrinkled pea;)
And go along with you ere you lose sight
Of what you came for and become like me,
Slave to a springtime passion for the earth.
How Love burns through the Putting in the Seed
On through the watching for that early birth
When, just as the soil tarnishes with weed,
The sturdy seedling with arched body comes
Shouldering its way and shedding the earth crumbs.
Incidentally, follow the link for great sexual verse from Dickinson, Herrick, and others as well.
Have the writers never read Shakespeare? The Sonnets not sexual? In Hamlet alone I can think of three or four particularly dirty places (my favorite is "Of crowflowers, nettles, daisies, and long purples, / That liberal shepherds give a grosser name, / But our cold maids do dead men's fingers call them."). How about my favorite Greek playwright, Aristophanes? How about Whitman? Millay? Chaucer? Ovid? And this is me explicitly trying to avoid the latter half of the twentieth century.
You know what, let's just put on a performance of Lysistrata following the ceremony. 2400 years later, and it's still a good plan.
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4 comments:
jeff---
i just looked at the editorial at ibd. you're nice to call it "ignorant." i'd go with just plain stupid.
still the same old-song-and-dance--using fear to try to make us cower: alexander might say this or that, something dirty. many people think poetry is supposed to be sweet and that frost is sweet. it's actually hard for me to string together words about this...it's that ridiculous.
Nancy - it took me a while to string together words on this one as well, and I still think the post ended up a bit scattered ;-)
When you teach poetry, is it in a separate unit or incorporated into the year?
It's not just that Frost is capable of being plenty dirty. I recently re-read "The Gift Outright" and felt there were all these very troubling imperialistic/Manifest Destiny tones in the thing. I hope Alexander takes the opportunity to read an inaugural poem with the word "hooters" in it. Or maybe the word "fulias," which is my verification word here and sounds very, very nasty to me.
Carrie - I just wrote and erased three or four potential definitions for "fulias," then remembered that I actually try to control my online image to an extent :-)
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