We thought we’d take it easy in Christmas week and serve you up something a little more funny that filthy – this time only. After wading through any amount of bad ebook editions, and no small number of reader submissions (thanks for the free porn!), we thought the below was particularly apposite. Enjoy.
On Reading Poorly Transcribed Erotica
She stood before him wearing only pantries
and he groped for her Volvo under the gauze.
She had saved her public hair, and his cook
went hard as a fist. They fell to the bad.
He shoveled his duck into her posse
and all her worm juices spilled out.
Still, his enormous election raged on.
Her beasts heaved as he sacked them,
and his own nibbles went stuff as well.
She put her tong in his rear and talked ditty.
Oh, it was all that he could do not to comb.
Jill Alexander Essbaum lives and writes in Austin, Texas, and is published by No Tell Books, whose volumes of bedside poetry are definitely worth checking out…
If you’ve got a suggestion for Monday’s dirty poem, don’t hesitate to get in touch…
The work of American poet William Carlos Williams (September 17, 1883 – March 4, 1963) is best known for its sharp and clear imagery, and this poem gives a good account of it. It is often claimed that it is based on Alfred Steiglitz‘s 1902 photograph, Spring Showers (below right), although the poem goes much deeper to explore the Sycamore as, as the critics put it, ‘the tree of life’ and thus continuing the theme of our last Monday poem. Enjoy.
The Young Sycamore
I must tell you
this young tree
whose round and firm trunk
between the wet
pavement and the gutter
(where water
is trickling) rises
bodily
into the air with
one undulant
thrust half its height-
and then
dividing and waning
sending out
young branches on
all sides-
hung with cocoons
it thins
till nothing is left of it
but two
eccentric knotted
twigs
bending forward
hornlike at the top
William Carlos Williams
If you’ve got a suggestion for Monday’s dirty poem, don’t hesitate to get in touch…
Apologies for the quiet around here – we’ve been a bit under the weather at Bookkake towers with the seasonal lurgy. However, nothing shall stop the Monday dirty poem, so here goes.
Well, first we should say that this was sent in by David Jones, who said we “should have shame at your paucity of vocabulary that you can label Neruda On Wine dirty, when it is erudite, fanciful, a feast of images and knowledge” and we should “avoid using that same shabby, inadequate and demeaning word for this fun poem by Graves”. I’m grateful to David for sending this one in, and agree that it indeed contains a wealth of startling and appropriate imagery from the battlefield and the mediaeval court, set to a lovely iambic tetrameter in a fine double couplet quatrain structure. It is also addressed to the poet’s johnson.
Down, wanton, down
Down, wanton, down have you no shame
That at the whisper of Love’s name,
Or Beauty’s, presto! up you raise
Your angry head and stand at gaze?
Poor Bombard-captain, sworn to reach
The ravelin and effect a breach—
Indifferent what you storm or why,
So be that in the breach you die!
Love may be blind, but Love at least
Knows what is man and what mere beast;
Or Beauty wayward, but requires
More delicacy from her squires.
Tell me, my witless, whose one boast
Could be your staunchness at the post,
When were you made a man of parts
To think fine and profess the arts?
Will many-gifted Beauty come
Bowing to your bald rule of thumb,
Or Love swear loyalty to your crown?
Be gone, have done! Down, wanton, down!
Thanks very much to Katherine for bringing this gem to my attention for this week’s Dirty Monday Poem. It recently won the 2008 Poetry Society Stanza Poetry Competition. The theme of this year’s competition was ‘Sloth’ (the antithesis of the National Poetry Day theme of ‘Work’).
Daniel Craig: The Screensaver
…and when I fail to focus, when I tire,
he rises like a Christ newly baptised
in sky blue trunks, reminding me desire
will always lie in wait and be disguised
as men with healing hands and cute-cruel lips
and arms I’d die for should they ever press
too hard against my throat.
When water drips
from him the fish swim to his feet, confess
how happily waylaid they are, congeal
in spasmic foil and, even then, mouth how
the breeding pools upstream are no big deal.
Before my eyes bake white like theirs I vow
I’ll hit a key. Before I go berserk
I’ll kill him with one finger. Wake up. Work.
Richard Goodson, ak.a. dirtyfilthypoet, lives in Nottingham, U.K., currently working towards a PhD, and his first collection. He performs his work, leads writing workshops – and teaches Literature and Writing seminars at Nottingham Trent University. In his day job he teaches English language to asylum-seekers and refugees. Here’s his blog and his myspace page.
If you’ve got a suggestion for Monday’s dirty poem, don’t hesitate to get in touch…
Unsurprisingly, we at Bookkake believe there’s too little sex in literature. But we still have a soft spot for the Literary Review’s annual Bad Sex in Fiction Award, established by Auberon Waugh in 1993 to “gently dissuade” authors from including “unconvincing, perfunctory, embarrassing or redundant passages of a sexual nature in otherwise sound literary novels”. This year’s winner was Rachel Johnson (sister of London mayor Boris), for a passage including such gems as these:
“I find myself gripping his ears and tugging at the locks curling over them, beside myself, and a strange animal noise escapes from me as the mounting, Wagnerian crescendo overtakes me.
“I really do hope at this point that all the Spodders are, as requested, attending the meeting about slug clearance…”
Her novel Shire Hell was singled out by the judges for its superlative “mixture of cliche and euphemism” and “a couple of really bad animal metaphors”. But we were also pleased to see the don of Bad Sex writing, John Updike, honoured with a lifetime achievement award.
How beautiful to think
that each of these clean secretaries
at night, to please her lover, takes
a fountain into her mouth
and lets her insides, drenched with seed,
flower into her landscapes:
meadows sprinkled with baby’s breath,
hoarse twiggy woods, birds dipping, a multitude
of skies containing clouds, plowed earth stinking
of its upturned humus, and small farms each
with a silver silo.
Taking the piss out of bad literature is an easy – and dangerous – game, but we’re all for the war on cliche and, particularly, euphemism. “Plowed earth stinking” indeed.
Continuing our series of dirty poems for a Monday morning. I used to work on a vineyard, and can tell you that Neruda captures perfectly the sensuality of wine, the physicality of the ripening vine, and the pure, thrusting fecundity of the grape itself. It’s not even one of his dirtiest, by a long way, but I’ll save those for later.
Day-colored wine,
night-colored wine,
wine with purple feet
or wine with topaz blood,
wine,
starry child
of earth,
wine, smooth
as a golden sword,
soft
as lascivious velvet,
wine, spiral-seashelled
and full of wonder,
amorous,
marine;
never has one goblet contained you,
one song, one man,
you are choral, gregarious,
at the least, you must be shared.
At times
you feed on mortal
memories;
your wave carries us
from tomb to tomb,
stonecutter of icy sepulchers,
and we weep
transitory tears;
your
glorious
spring dress
is different,
blood rises through the shoots,
wind incites the day,
nothing is left
of your immutable soul.
Wine
stirs the spring, happiness
bursts through the earth like a plant,
walls crumble,
and rocky cliffs,
chasms close,
as song is born.
A jug of wine, and thou beside me
in the wilderness,
sang the ancient poet.
Let the wine pitcher
add to the kiss of love its own.
My darling, suddenly
the line of your hip
becomes the brimming curve
of the wine goblet,
your breast is the grape cluster,
your nipples are the grapes,
the gleam of spirits lights your hair,
and your navel is a chaste seal
stamped on the vessel of your belly,
your love an inexhaustible
cascade of wine,
light that illuminates my senses,
the earthly splendor of life.
But you are more than love,
the fiery kiss,
the heat of fire,
more than the wine of life;
you are
the community of man,
translucency,
chorus of discipline,
abundance of flowers.
I like on the table,
when we’re speaking,
the light of a bottle
of intelligent wine.
Drink it,
and remember in every
drop of gold,
in every topaz glass,
in every purple ladle,
that autumn labored
to fill the vessel with wine;
and in the ritual of his office,
let the simple man remember
to think of the soil and of his duty,
to propagate the canticle of the wine.
Pablo Neruda
If you’ve got a suggestion for Monday’s dirty poem, don’t hesitate to get in touch…
I think we might do this dirty poem thing once a week, on Monday. But don’t count on it. Here’s number two in the series, and isn’t it lovely?
If I were a cinnamon peeler
I would ride your bed
and leave the yellow bark dust
on your pillow.
Your breasts and shoulders would reek
you could never walk through markets
without the profession of my fingers
floating over you. The blind would
stumble certain of whom they approached
though you might bathe
under rain gutters, monsoon.
Here on the upper thigh
at this smooth pasture
neighbor to your hair
or the crease
that cuts your back. This ankle.
You will be known among strangers
as the cinnamon peeler’s wife.
I could hardly glance at you
before marriage
never touch you
– your keen nosed mother, your rough brothers.
I buried my hands
in saffron, disguised them
over smoking tar,
helped the honey gatherers…
When we swam once
I touched you in water
and our bodies remained free,
you could hold me and be blind of smell.
You climbed the bank and said
this is how you touch other women
the grasscutter’s wife, the lime burner’s daughter.
And you searched your arms
for the missing perfume.
and knew
what good is it
to be the lime burner’s daughter
left with no trace
as if not spoken to in an act of love
as if wounded without the pleasure of scar.
You touched
your belly to my hands
in the dry air and said
I am the cinnamon
peeler’s wife. Smell me.
Let’s start the week with a poem, shall we? I’ve been asked to read at a friend’s wedding next month, and I’ve been trying to choose something. I’ve been digging through Rilke, one of my favourite poets, who writes wonderfully on love, but less well on marriage, and I haven’t found the right piece yet. If anyone has any suggestions, Rilke or otherwise, I’d love to har them.
One selection I certainly won’t be reading from, but I do want to reproduce here, are the seven phallic poems from 1915, one of the most perfect meldings of eroticism and art in all literature. Here’s the fourth, translated by John J. L. Mood:
You don’t know towers, with your diffidence
Yet now you’ll become aware
of a tower in that wonderful rare
space in you. Hide your countenance.
You’ve erected it unsuspectingly,
by turn and glance and indirection,
and I, blissful one, am allowed entry.
Ah, how in there I am so tight.
Coax me to the summit:
so as to fling into your soft night,
with the soaring of a womb-dazzling rocket,
more feeling that I am quite.
Last night I was in Soho for the gay lit salon Polari, to hear readings from Stella Duffy and Maureen Duffy (no relation, I’m fairly certain, although some in the audience were a little confused).
Maureen Duffy read from her most recent novel, Alchemy, a wonderful love story with two strands in history, the 17th Century and the present day. Duffy’s writing always encompasses a vast range of references, and Alchemy muses on Shakespearean cross-dressing and compares cyberporn with the more tactile pleasures of tart cards.
Stella Duffy is always a joy to hear, and she was in fine form reading from her new novel The Room of Lost Things as well as 2006′s Singling Out the Couples, which involved some extraordinary yogic leg-raises, and a vicious but brilliant single-person’s attack on smug couples, although she was at pains to point out that life does not always mirror art, or vice versa, and she and her girlfriend of 14 years were very happy, thank you very much.
Maureen Duffy also spoke of the lack of support for gay publishing in the UK, singling out her novel The Microcosm of 1966, a groundbreaking lesbian work set in the legendary Gateways club and now out of print. But there was obvious pleasure – tinged with sorrow – in reading from her recent poetry collection, Family Values, one of whose bittersweet verses I’ll include here – without permission, but I hope she won’t mind.
An email from The London Adventure informs us of an upcoming event surely of interest to Bookkake readers:
Niall McDevitt leads a poetic walk tracing the steps of the legendary Frenchman and his fellow communard/poet/homosexual/alcoholic Paul Verlaine.
Sunday 19 Oct meeting at the Eleanor Cross in the forecourt of Charing Cross station. 1pm. £5/3 (unwaged). Info: 07722163823
The London Adventure is an informal literary club whose regular perambulations of the English capital have taken in such favourites of Bookkake as Patrick Hamilton, Aubrey Beardsley, William Burroughs and many others. This walk should be of particular interest, as it promises to include access to Rimbaud and Verlaine’s house on Royal College Street, where the pair lived in 1873.
Only recently I picked up a copy of Rimbaud, Psychogeographer by Aidan Andrew Dun, originally presented as a lecture at the Bath Royal Literary and Scientific Institue in 2006. If you don’t know Dun, he’s a contemporary poet of a particularly fine skill, with a special affection for London: his Vale Royal, an epic poem in 12 cantos, concerns the mythology of the city, centred on the church of Old St Pancras, once acclaimed as “the head and mother of all Christian Churches”. An early, and rather poor quality reading – by Dun, in that very churchyard – is available on YouTube:
Rimbaud, Psychogeographer covers much of the same territory as Vale Royal, but links those emanations to Rimbaud’s poetry:
Single-handedly, and by the age of nineteen, Artur Rimbaud laid the foundations of modern poetry. He then torpedoed literature, hit her below the water-line, Pearl-Harboured his vision in a surprise attack and vanished from civilisation. Let’s take an aerial view of the life and work, the doomed loves and dark fate of the great Artorius. I’ll then present you with a new theory of his literary suicide. The decision of the poet to abandon his art represents the most impossible disappearance in the history of escapology. My hypothesis hinges on the psychogegraphy of London, where Rimbaud did much of his great work, both writing and research.
Dun goes on to give a crash-course in the mythology of Kings’ Cross, from the time of Arthurian legend up until the present day, and decodes Rimbaud’s works and its references. In Promontoire, from Illuminations (French text, English follows), he finds:
Villas and dependencies? That sprawling empire of gothic hotel, ‘flanked, hollowed and dominated’ by Railtrack. Mounds in odd parks? Humpbacked Old St Pancras Churchyard with its atmospheres and willows. ‘The Japanese tree’, that dreadlocked witch-elm behind the church. All the connections! The vagabond Rimbaud had left a cryptogram in the Illuminations. Like some intentional gypsy heiroglyph made of twigs and acting as a marker, waysign to be read by the next man down the line.
Old St Pancras Churchyard, tucked away behind the railway station, is indeed a strange and resonant place, as anyone who has visited it will know, full of odd assemblages, such as the Hardy tree, arrayed with gravestones stacked up when the churchyard was first cleared by the Midland Railways.
Dun goes on to talk to old residents of the area to uncover other correlations to buildings destroyed in the Blitz, and described by Blake in his Jerusalem. It’s an excellent and poetic work, and not easy to track down, but Housman’s had a number of copies last time I was there.
My favourite reference to Rimbaud and Verlaine’s sojourn in London, however, is in Patrick Keiller‘s peerless film London, which I urge you to see if you’ve never had the pleasure. Noting that, before Camden, the pair lived in Howland Street, W1, just west of Tottenham Court Road, the narrator of the film reveals that, although that house has long since disappeared, the inhabitants of London saw fit to commemorate the relationship with a suitable memorial:
Photographs of plaque from No. 8 Royal College Street by Graham, of St Pancras Churchyard by StefZ and of the BT Tower by Uli Harder, all under Creative Commons.
Last night I was in Soho for the gay lit salon 
, a wonderful love story with two strands in history, the 17th Century and the present day. Duffy’s writing always encompasses a vast range of references, and Alchemy muses on Shakespearean cross-dressing and compares cyberporn with the more tactile pleasures of 
