Calamus

In making a poster for National Poetry Month, using Wordle word clouds made from my own homoerotic poems, followed up by another version using one of my typewriters, the idea was suggested to make something using Walt Whitman's most well-known homoerotic poems: the "Calamus" section of Leaves of Grass. May is the month of Whitman's birthday, so it seems appropriate to make some art in his honor this month.

So, I've made some Wordle versions of the complete text of "Calamus" from the 1860 edition of Leaves of Grass, the most complete and most explicit version of these poems that Whitman ever published. The 1860 edition, it is agreed by many scholars, to be the peak of Whitman's brilliance, the peak of his sexually-explicit writing, and perhaps his best overall edition. After 1860 Whitman began a long process of self-censoring his poems, of rewriting them to be more acceptable to the general reader. He left many poems out, and by the "death bed" edition of 1891-92, he had rewritten many poems to be more mainstream and bowdlerized entire sections of Leaves to be more neutral and less provocative.

You can do your comparisons of the various editions of Leaves by cruising through The Walt Whitman Archive, one of the best, most thorough, and most complete of any poet's archives on the Internet. You can examine the complete texts of every edition, and view and download scans of the actual printed pages, covers, and supplementary materials published by Whitman during and after his lifetime. This is an invaluable, highly useful tool for any Whitman scholar, from the most casual to the most scrupulous.





I note how the word that appears largest in these Calammus word clouds is "love." That's entirely appropriate, as that is the theme of Whitman's Calamus, after all.



And I've made another poster idea, too, based on combining these Calamus word clouds with images from the Whitman Archives. Elements include pages from the Calamus section of the 1860 edition, the distinctive green cover of Leaves of Grass, a portrait of Whitman by artist Thomas Eakins, and also Eakins famous painting The Swimming Hole, which legend has it was inspired by Whitman's poetry.


Click on image for larger version.

So, Happy Birthday, Walt!

A Poster for Poetry Month 2

(Click on images for larger versions.)

A version of the poster I designed for National Poetry Month, used as an element of another design idea. Not the first image I've rolled through one of my vintage typewriters, but this one definitely fits into the poetry/words/type/art theme of the original poster.



This is an idea I've explored before, in which the image emerging from the typewriter is one impossible to have done so: an anachronism, a technological impossibility, yet evoking both the history and the development of printing technology. The contrast and overlap are poetically evocative, for me.



This close-up, tightly-cropped version is my favorite version here, I think. I like the image emerging from the machine, as though it had been typed up. The dominant element is the Poetry Month poster, though, not the typewriter. The balance and composition of elements is important in any poster design, and I think this has a better balance than the overall view.

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Questions were raised in comments on my original presentation of this poster design, from Eshuneutics (who is always worth reading), that are relevant to the poster design and concept on several levels:

. . . Would anyone notice it [the poster] is gay? Now, isn't that the eternal question again: What is gay art/poetry? This intrigues me more and more (because as you wrote in a post, the gay image [in] mid-America is not the same as on the coasts, in other words, we don't belong to the stereotype). If the wordle had SEX, QUEER and the image was a male couple, hey, it would be obvious. Yes, obvious to the gay stereotyping mass. To me, there is an ambience to the poster that says something. . . .

These are really interesting questions. They don't really have answers, at least not definitive answers. Some answers can be found, personally and locally, but these questions will remain open-ended for most writers and artists. I want to return to the question of ambience, or sensibility, later. But first, let's deal with the obvious.

Yes, I could have made the poster more obvious, more openly and overtly homoerotic (gay, LGBT, homosexual, etc.) by including more obvious elements such as gay-tagged words in the Wordle clouds, or a photo of two men embracing (which I do have, from past photo shoots), or two women, or other obvious signs and symbols. (Bang a cymbal to make the symbol more obvious.) It's not hard to make LGBT content explicit: all you have to do is depict same-sex couples together.

Although, let's be realistically honest about same-sex couples nowadays, and avoid one older set of stereotypes: in other words, let's use psychologically-positive and openly-loving images of gay couples. Depictions of gay lovers as innately self-hating and self-destructive, bitchy, unstable, and promiscuous are themselves stereotypes.

There can be purpose to using the stereotypes. With some people it is necessary to make it obvious. With some others, maybe less necessary, but perhaps polite. My intent was indeed to make a poster mining the oft-overlooked wing of poetry that is openly, even proudly, LGBT.

But what makes a poem gay? Subject matter? Sexual content? Explicit statements in the body of the poem, along the lines of those explicit signs already mentioned? The fact that a love poem written to a man by another man might logically be considered gay in intent and subject? (Not overlooking the truth that a poem written from a persona or character viewpoint isn't necessarily portraying the author's character or viewpoint, even in a so-called confessional lyric.)

While I have been explicitly homoerotic, even sexual, in some poems and art, I also find myself wanting to be subtle and indirect about as often: an oblique approach to the subject matter, that evokes rather than bludgeons the audience. Perhaps this is Midwestern reserve; at times it probably is. In other instances, it may be because I am less interested in reportage and more interested in metaphor and parataxis. No-one writes the same poem in the same way all the time, or ought to.

It can also be a desire, in my case as an artist and writer, to depict love and desire, rather than simple fucking. To present eros as itself, in its aspect as life-force, the power under all life, that moves us to unite as two solitudes meeting, on an energetic/psychological/spiritual as well as physical level. I am more interested in eros and Tantra, in my own art, than I am in producing work that others might view as purely pornographic. I am interested in transcendence—which does not exclude the physical, the raunchy, and the explicit, but rather embraces it—since the essential practice of Tantra is to take the power of the raw, base emotions and convert them into fuel for attaining enlightenment.

There are ways to subvert artistic stereotypes, just as there are ways to subvert clichés in poetry, by turning them on their edges. One tactic is to overdo the stereotype to the point of absurdity or irony. (An overused tactic of postmodernism, one I don't like very much.) Another is to make substitutions that are near to the stereotype, without exactly repeating it; the audience will perceive a conceptual echo of the stereotype, but be thrown off because it's not an exact replay.

I find myself, in a poster design such as this one, as well as in art and poems from time to time, preferring the oblique approach. I want to evoke, not bludgeon. I don't want to fall into stereotype, precisely because I want to give a fresh take on Poetry Month, from a different direction. There is also a connection between Wordle word clouds and both traditional concrete poetry and contemporary VisPo (visual poetry), although the latter has (like much post-avant-garde poetry of the present moment) more theory than practice supporting it.

It is possible to evoke LGBT literary and artistic history, I also believe, by using the old, pre-Stonewall, pre-Gay Liberation tactic of the "coded text." It was common, in much LGBT art and literature prior to the modern LGBT rights movement(s), to hide or "code" the queer content by using tropes familiar to subcultural insiders that outsiders would not know about, and therefore completely miss. Signs and symbols, turns or phrase, images, coded words: these were all used to evoke "the love that dared not speak its name" to those already "in the know" while excluding those ignorant of the code.

For this poster, using coded texts seemed an appropriate way to give the poster a gay sensibility without being stereotypical or blatant. In this case that meant using some of my own poems that are homoerotic without being sexually explicit as source texts for Wordle. It also meant using a male nude from a previous photo shoot, although the nudity is mostly hidden by the text itself. For one version of the poster it also meant using pink as the dominant color, which is a color associated with gay rights via the historical pink triangle used by the Nazis in World War II concentration camps for homosexuals, and reclaimed since as a positive gay rights emblem. Although personally I prefer the blue version of the poster, on purely aesthetic grounds, an art director might use the pink version precisely because of what it evokes. Again, how direct do we want to be?

To return at last to the question of ambiance or sensibility, the question arises again and again regarding if one is able to locate or identify a "gay sensibility" in artwork and poetry. Is there indeed a gay sensibility produced in his art by an artist who happens to be gay, even if the content of the artwork is not overtly (blatantly, stereotypically) gay, sexual, or homoerotic?

Although I do have an opinion here, at the moment I want to point out that discovering a gay sensibility in an artist's work is often a sub rosa attempt to identify the artist's biography with their artwork (the authorial fallacy), under the assumption that any gay artist must produce gay art even if they don't overtly want to. This assumption is itself a sub rosa (perhaps unconscious) attempt to categorize an artist's work based on their "innate" character or sexuality—which is itself a subtle form of homophobia. (Even liberated gay artists sometimes find subtle forms of internalized homophobia in themselves and their work; it can be a major opus to root it out.)

Homophobia? Indeed. You almost never see straight (non-LGBT) artists' sensibilities discussed in this same way, as though their sexuality was the dominant and deterministic factor in their artistic sensibility. The fact that it matters at all if there is or is not a "gay sensibility" can be taken as covert homophobia, and in practice it often is just that. For many straight critics discussing LGBT art, discovering a gay sensibility can be a road towards critical dismissal, a way of saying that this art doesn't matter to normal people. Indeed, for many mainstream critics this is a common and typical road towards critical dismissal of any and all "genre" art, from LGBT content to science fiction—and thus are enforced the critical and psychological standards of normative social and sexual expression. Normative critiques against non-normative stereotypes can be a direct, if subtle, forum for reinforcing what is considered normative: dismissing the margins keeps the center in power.

Discovering a gay sensibility in art, however, can also be taken as an attempt by gay artists to reclaim a formerly negative label as a positive emblem, in exactly the same way that the pink triangle was reclaimed. But to be taken this way, it seems important to know that the reclaiming is being done by other gay artists, rather than non-LGBT critics. This brings us back, full circle, to the insider's coded text. The distinction between insider and outsider, regarding discovering a gay sensibility in art by a gay artist, therefore, may be as simple as knowing whether the motivation behind the discovery is homophobia or reclaiming.

My own opinion is that there is indeed some kind of gay sensibility in art—the word "ambiance" is apt—although pinning it down can be elusive. It must vary from artist to artist, so it may be more useful to discuss gay sensibilities (plural). Different aspects appear at different time, in different ways. The subtle line between overt and coded. Can I tell you exactly what gay sensibility is? No; and I doubt anyone else can, either. In my own art, I can say that I do think that because I am a gay man who makes art, some aspect of my own sensibility, which is that of a gay man, gets into all my art, whether or not that art is openly, blatantly gay in content or not. It can be very subtle.

I do believe that one fundamental aspect of my own sensibility, which is a gay sensibility, and which might be shared by other gay artists, is empathy: the ability to walk a mile in the Other's shoes. To use imagination to create unity between disparate people. The use empathy to feel the suffering and joy of others. To be very aware, having grown up as an often-attacked Other within my own culture, of how the Other thinks and feels. Sympathetic thinking is after all one road to genuine empathy. if you can understand how someone Other has felt like a victim or a victor, you can walk a mile in their shoes. And thus all of my poetry, all of my art, I believe, contains the certain use of imagination and empathy to make those connections. I build a lot of bridges. Parataxis and collage are useful artistic tools that I use all the time.

All this discussion from a simple throwaway poster design made on a whim, for an annual designated national month about poetry that no-one except poets really cares about or will pay attention to!

Walt Whitman Langorous in Summer

(Excerpts from Walt Whitman, The Complete Prose (1892), from The Walt Whitman Archive.)

Langorous, lounging, sensual, relaxed Walt Whitman, by the pond, by the stream, the lake, in summer's high heat, in July and August relaxing. In so many ways an influence on me, not just as a writer, but in terms of attitude, of approach to life, of worldview, of desire. So desirous, so tempting, to emulate Walt, and find a quiet, private glade or meadow near the local grasslands and stands of trees by the river, and lie in summer splendor, and do nothing.

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A JULY AFTERNOON BY THE POND

The fervent heat, but so much more endurable in this pure air—the white and pink pond-blossoms, with great heart-shaped leaves; the glassy waters of the creek, the banks, with dense bushery, and the picturesque beeches and shade and turf; the tremulous, reedy call of some bird from recesses, breaking the warm, indolent, half-voluptuous silence; an occasional wasp, hornet, honey-bee or bumble (they hover near my hands or face, yet annoy me not, nor I them, as they appear to examine, find nothing, and away they go)—the vast space of the sky overhead so clear, and the buzzard up there sailing his slow whirl in majestic spirals and discs; just over the surface of the pond, two large slate-color'd dragon-flies, with wings of lace, circling and darting and occasionally balancing themselves quite still, their wings quivering all the time, (are they not showing off for my amusement?)—the pond itself, with the sword-shaped calamus; the water snakes—occasionally a flitting blackbird, with red dabs on his shoulders, as he darts slantingly by—the sounds that bring out the solitude, warmth, light and shade—the quawk of some pond duck—(the crickets and grasshoppers are mute in the noon heat, but I hear the song of the first cicadas;)—then at some distance the rattle and whirr of a reaping machine as the horses draw it on a rapid walk through a rye field on the opposite side of the creek—(what was the yellow or light-brown bird, large as a young hen, with short neck and long-stretch'd legs I just saw, in flapping and awkward flight over there through the trees?)—the prevailing delicate, yet palpable, spicy, grassy, clovery perfume to my nostrils; and over all, encircling all, to my sight and soul, the free space of the sky, transparent and blue—and hovering there in the west, a mass of white-gray fleecy clouds the sailors call "shoals of mackerel"—the sky, with silver swirls like locks of toss'd hair, spreading, expanding—a vast voiceless, formless simulacrum—yet may-be the most real reality and formulator of everything—who knows?

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Yesterday driving in the country between our local small towns, corn high on either side of the two-lane, making a tunnel under the clear blue sky, five or six turkey vultures flew up from beside the road where they were feeding on the remains of a dead skunk. Later that afternoon, saw and smelled another dead skunk near the road. A day for the smelly Tantric reminders of death.

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A SUN-BATH—NAKEDNESS

Sunday, Aug. 27.— Another day quite free from mark'd prostration and pain. It seems indeed as if peace and nutriment from heaven subtly filter into me as I slowly hobble down these country lanes and across fields, in the good air—as I sit here in solitude with Nature—open, voiceless, mystic, far removed, yet palpable, eloquent Nature. I merge myself in the scene, in the perfect day. Hovering over the clear brook-water, I am sooth'd by its soft gurgle in one place, and the hoarser murmurs of its three-foot fall in another. Come, ye disconsolate, in whom any latent eligibility is left—come get the sure virtues of creek-shore, and wood and field. Two months (July and August, '77,) have I absorb'd them, and they begin to make a new man of me. Every day, seclusion—every day at least two or three hours of freedom, bathing, no talk, no bonds, no dress, no books, no manners.

Shall I tell you, reader, to what I attribute my already much-restored health? That I have been almost two years, off and on, without drugs and medicines, and daily in the open air. Last summer I found a particularly secluded little dell off one side by my creek, originally a large dug-out marl-pit, now abandon'd, fill'd with bushes, trees, grass, a group of willows, a straggling bank, and a spring of delicious water running right through the middle of it, with two or three little cascades. Here I retreated every hot day, and follow it up this summer. Here I realize the meaning of that old fellow who said he was seldom less alone than when alone. Never before did I get so close to Nature; never before did she come so close to me. By old habit, I pencill'd down from to time to time, almost automatically, moods, sights, hours, tints and outlines, on the spot. Let me specially record the satisfaction of this current forenoon, so serene and primitive, so conventionally exceptional, natural.

An hour or so after breakfast I wended my way down to the recesses of the aforesaid dell, which I and certain thrushes, cat-birds, &c., had all to ourselves. A light south-west wind was blowing through the tree-tops. It was just the place and time for my Adamic air-bath and flesh-brushing from head to foot. So hanging clothes on a rail nearby, keeping old broadbrim straw on head and easy shoes on feet, havn't I had a good time the last two hours! First with the stiff-elastic bristles rasping arms, breast, sides, till they turn'd scarlet—then partially bathing in the clear waters of the running brook—taking everything very leisurely, with many rests and pauses—stepping about barefooted every few minutes now and then in some neighboring black ooze, for unctuous mud-bath to my feet—a brief second and third rinsing in the crystal running waters—rubbing with the fragrant towel—slow negligent promenades on the turf up and down in the sun, varied with occasional rests, and further frictions of the bristle-brush—sometimes carrying my portable chair with me from place to place, as my range is quite extensive here, nearly a hundred rods, feeling quite secure from intrusion, (and that indeed I am not at all nervous about, if it accidentally happens.)

As I walk'd slowly over the grass, the sun shone out enough to show the shadow moving with me. Somehow I seem'd to get identity with each and every thing around me, in its condition. Nature was naked, and I was also. It was too lazy, soothing, and joyous-equable to speculate about. Yet I might have thought somehow in this vein: Perhaps the inner never lost rapport we hold with earth, light, air, trees, &c., is not to be realized through eyes and mind only, but through the whole corporeal body, which I will not have blinded or bandaged any more than the eyes. Sweet, sane, still Nakedness in Nature!—ah if poor, sick, prurient humanity in cities might really know you once more! Is not nakedness then indecent? No, not inherently. It is your thought, your sophistication, your fear, your respectability, that is indecent. There come moods when these clothes of ours are not only too irksome to wear, but are themselves indecent. Perhaps indeed he or she to whom the free exhilarating extasy of nakedness in Nature has never been eligible (and how many thousands there are!) has not really known what purity is—nor what faith or art or health really is. (Probably the whole curriculum of first-class philosophy, beauty, heroism, form, illustrated by the old Hellenic race—the highest height and deepest depth known to civilization in those departments—came from their natural and religious idea of Nakedness.)

Many such hours, from time to time, the last two summers—I attribute my partial rehabilitation largely to them. Some good people may think it a feeble or half-crack'd way of spending one's time and thinking. May-be it is.

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Summer's heat clothes the naked skin with humid sweat on those hottest afternoons when nothing seems to move, and the loudest sound in the world is the thrumming cicadas building and crying and fading from all of the surrounding trees. A sound so loud it echoes of the Void, of silence, drowning out all other sounds, all other thoughts, making a silence in me that silence falls into and is obliviated. There is no solitude under the pear tree when the cicadas throb endlessly. Come dusk, the breeze at last turns cool, wicking the sweat off your forehead and shoulders where it had lingered dripping all afternoon. You sit and watch the light turn to blue, to purple, pink, and golden-amber, and at last fade out, through shades of grey, into another kind of oblivion, that of the night. Loud bullfrogs down by the stream, and crickets throughout the lawn replace the cicadas as night-voices. What sweeter music there is none.

Langour and Luxury

Ocatvio Paz wrote in his important book-length essay, In Light of India, on some essential differences between Western poetry and classical Sanskrit poetry, which is the living foundation of Indian poetry. In Western poetry, lyricism is often accompanied by melancholy. Paz writes:

In Indian poetry, on the other hand, there is a feeling that is rare in ours: luxuriousness, that moment in which the body, without losing its composure, seems to waver, enveloped by extreme pleasure, and falls into a delicious swoon. The poem becomes a naked body adorned with jewels, lying conquered. Luxuriousness is an effluvium that glows and vanishes. It is also an agent of metamorphosis: the male body, weakened by an excess of pleasure, twists into that of a woman; in turn, the female body, goaded by desire, leaps on top like a tiger. The transposition adds ambiguity to the erotic battle: Krishna seems at times like a maiden, and the graceful Parvati, in a flash of the eyes, turns into the terrifying Durga. . . . This is the great difference from Western eroticism, which since the end of the eighteenth century has been largely concerned with infraction and violence. Bataille emphasizes that eroticism is essentially transgression: Hindu art proves him wrong. It is not a legal code but a fan: unfolding, refolding, unfolding again, displaying the whole range of pleasures. An art and a poetry that have never known sadism.

Eroticism in Indian art—eros itself, if you will—is often depicted as languorous, as opposed to conquering. Sexuality is not a war between the sexes, but a blurring of their boundaries. Role-reversals are not uncommon: the woman must ride on top, and be dominant. The rigid gender and sexual roles that have become reified by custom and religious dictates in the West are not present in this poetry. Neither is the Western division of soul and body, the alienation of the flesh, the exaltation of the spirit at the expense of denigrating the physical form. Even Indian food is luxurious, a complex blending of scents and tastes that overwhelm and envelope the senses and the soul alike. In the spirit of full disclosure, I must admit that for me Indian food is comfort food, bringing back memories of my early childhood in Andhra Pradesh. (Comfort food has become even more available now that one can find in the USA restaurants that include or even specialize in South Indian cuisine.)

Yet even within the Western poetic tradition there are eddies and streams of langour and luxury. I find them especially in the poets who write in the Spanish-speaking tradition, both in Europe and in Central and South America. I find these characteristics in Federico Garcia Lorca, in Pablo Neruda, in Antonio Machado, in Xavier Villaruttia, and others in this lineage.

I have maintained for some time that the full flowering of Surrealism was not amongst the French and Italian poets who founded that school, but in Latin America. French Surrealism remained a post-Freudian intellectual game; even as it valued the irrationality of dreams and the unconscious, it valued them primarily as sources of imagery that were mined for use by the conscious craft of the waking poet. There are some marvelous games invented by the Surrealists, but they remained games. And there is little luxury in the artistic results. More paranoia than langour, to be honest. The French Surrealists might have wanted to visit the jungle of dreams, but they didn't trust the jungle to provide for them, and so they never fully relaxed into its embrace. And later Western poetic -isms, in their polished intellectual rigor, have often dismissed langour and luxury as soft and not to be taken seriously as Art. The triumph of the rational insists that the sensual be demonized.

Octavio Paz himself is exemplary of the full flowering of what Surrealism could have become, and did become when it was employed by Latin American poets. In Paz as in the others mentioned above, the tools of Surrealism became fully embodied, fully alive. And this is because, unlike the French Surrealists but like the classical Sanskrit poets, the Spanish-speaking poets involved the physical body and its erotic possibilities in their poetry.

In his many essays on poetry and its history and sources, Paz returns again and again to the eroticism of the physical world, of nature, of the body, and the world as the body. Paz of course was strongly influenced by his many years spent living in India; the small selected poetry volume that speaks to this directly is A Tale of Two Gardens, one garden being Paz' native Mexico, the other India. Paz' poetry, for example Sunstone, is deeply luxurious while simultaneously rigorously formal and profoundly philosophical.

For myself, I often seek a more luxurious, sensual, langourous poetry. I seek a poetry of the body, an embodied erotic poetry, a poetry that evokes the senses as much as the mind. I've long stated that poetry written only from the head ultimately fails, and I stand by that. The soma needs to be part of the experience of reading and re-creating a poem in the reader's own self. It can't be always just dry, dessicated, puzzle-box, intellectual language-based heartless mental games, it needs to be full-body, full mind-body experience. The best poetry sings.

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So it is always a pleasure to discover a book of poetry new to me that is also able to evoke a powerful somatic response in the reader. In this case, it's both pleasure and inspiration. Sometimes the world does give you what you've been desiring.



Furious Lullaby by Oliver de la Paz.
(Southern Illinois University Press, 2007)

I was in the bookstore, browsing, when I came across Furious Lullaby. I had never seen this book before. I picked it up and scanned it, then put it back. After awhile, I came back to it, drawn by some unnamed instinct, and picked it up again, and began to read. I was soon completely absorbed. I bought the book, and took it home, and have now read through it several times.

I had never heard of the poet, Oliver de la Paz, and still know almost nothing about him. I am interested not so much in the poet's biography but rather in these poems that emerged from his life and heart.

And these poems are immensely satisfying to read. They are fierce, intelligent, often surprising, coming from oblique angles at otherwise familiar topics, deeply felt, occasionally funny, and altogether stunning. I haven't been turned on by a new book of poems like this in a long time. (Let's face it, most of what gets published these days is dull, dry, overly thought-out, self-conscious to a fault if not outright narcissistic, and lyrically bland.) De la Paz' poetic antecedents are Lorca, William Blake, perhaps Neruda or Paz or Machado. The poems remind of the suppleness of the Spanish-speaking tradition, both in terms of the surreal juxtapositions of images and objects, and in terms of the erotic language. There is a luxurious use of language here, a frequent display of pyrotechnic technique, but not for its own sake, rather in the service of what is being given in the poem. I feel no words are in excess, nothing needs to be trimmed away, it's all quite precise even in those moments of extremity or ecstasy.

The lyric poem is lately a small thing focused on small moments, small events, personal reflections, too much of smoke and mirrors. All too many MFA workshops teach poets to think small. In this book, to the contrary, de la Paz finds (as did Blake) whole universes in the grains of desert sand that scorpions clatter across. His poems often open outwards, taking in wide vistas, before returning in the end to where they began. Zoom out, zoom back in.

There are several Aubades in Furious Lullaby, for example, Aubade with a Thistle Bush Holding Six Songs, which has as its opening lines:

A man told me that he had wasted his life. I did not know him.
We were on a train moving from one trespass to the next,
the fields in the windows shifting utterly into daybreak.

He told me about the guitar he bought with a little cash
saved at odd jobs, how he could not play but kept the thing
as a symbol for failure.

An aubade, according to the Merriam-Webster Dictionary, is 1. a song or poem greeting the dawn; 2. a morning love song, or a song or poem of lovers parting at dawn; 3. morning music. (The latter being the opposite of a nocturne, an evening or night music.) The tradition of aubade in poetry is something one finds more often in the Romance languages than in the Anglo-Saxon rationalistic tongues. Some mornings one lingers, in langourous pleasure, in memory, before arising. Each of the several aubades in contains aspects of morning, of music, of lovers parting. Sometimes it's implied that lovers will rejoin come nightfall, but not always. Aubades can be both praise and farewell, and both tones are struck here.

Many of de la Paz' titles in Furious Lullaby are themselves intriguing enough to mention:

Aubade with Doves, a Television, and Fire

My Dearest Apostasy

What the Scapula Said

Epitaph for the Musculature of the Neck

The art of finding a great title for a poem is one that perhaps de la Paz might consciously work at, but these seem so effortless, so natural and un-mannerist, so fresh they take the breath away. Poems with "My Dearest" and "Aubade" in their titles outnumber the rest here; which itself lends a certain tone to the collection. As though an wordly cavalier, a learned aristocratic lover, was writing florid farewell and hello letters to the body, to lovers, to the Devil, to himself. There is wit, regret, langour, and sharp observation of the familiar here, all made sensual by the sparkle of a turn of phrase. I discussed Sanskrit poetry earlier, and there are connections here to that tradition as well, both sensually and philosophically.

I am taken back to my own childhood in tropical India, for example, by Aubade with Scorpions and Monsoon:

Little sleeper, I mentioned the scorpions
were thoughtless in the rain, as they swarm down

the length of the green skins to the flood, eel-like
with furious tails. Earlier, the sky

had turned a mustard color proving that August
and its rains would soon bathe the desert, making

the whole thing become a dark scar. Water caused
the scorpions to shelter against the cacti

spikes. . . .

Rather than quote the whole poem, I want to give just enough of a taste to inspire the reader to go seek out the rest.

I could go on and on, droning away with insufficient, inarticulate praise, and suffice to say Furious Lullaby rewards each reading.

The highest praise I can give a poet or book of poems is that reading the poems inspires me to write. When I re-read Rilke's Duino Elegies, I want to write. When I read Coleman Barks' luminous versions of Rumi, I want to write. When I re-read Jim Harrison's Letters to Yesenin, or Jean Valentine's Ordinary Things, or Sam Hamill's lucid translations of the Japanese haiku masters, or Octavio Paz, Federico Garcia Lorca, or Odysseas Elytis, I want to write. I don't write in imitation, but in response. Reading such poetry evokes a creative response; I discover that I have something to say back. I am triggered not by every poem, or every poet, but by those who speak most directly to my experience, and to my peculiar mindset or way of thinking about the world. Poems that speak to the whole self, to the soma as well as the mind, are often the most reliable triggers.

I find myself writing an aubade or two, in the current series of poems that have been coming to me this summer, after a long period of writing nothing much; and I have de la Paz to thank for kick-starting me. I also, in this new series of poems, have Jim Harrison to thank, for likewise kick-starting me as I re-read Letters to Yesenin, which are some of the most brilliant and gutsy prose-poems of the last fifty years. Both of these books were there in late June, when chronic illness was dragging me down, depressing me, and gradually wasting me away towards that edge of a precipice that's hard to climb back from. It was reading these two books of poems that opened that door in me that had been closed for many months, and new poems began to spill over the jamb. Now I find myself feeling better, surprised by a new treatment regimen that promises to turn around the downward spiral, not surprised so much by a cautious optimism that doesn't quite dare to assume the best since the worst has so often been the pattern these past few years. And as I feel better, surprised by it, I am equally surprised by the fierce will to make poems, make art, make music, that is rekindled in me. As though making poems were a pure reminder that I'm still here, still alive. And so I go on.

Furious Lullaby made me want to write, in response, and as I say, that's the highest praise I can give a book of poems.

Reading the Body

In thinking a lot about Walt Whitman, as I've been doing lately, unavoidably the body comes up. Not only in terms of embodiment, of Whitman's lists of experiences and bodily attributes; not only in terms of sexuality (since in revisions after the 1862 edition, even erotic Whitman started removing explicit sexual connotations from the poems in Leaves of Grass, rather than adding to them, as he did in the massive 1860 edition); not only in terms of sensuality and hedonic sensibility.

Rather, the body keeps coming up as the neglected partner of the spirit, or mind, or soul, which has been its problematic place in Western culture since St. Augustine made his doctrinal formulation of original sin, of the fall and its redemption, in which matter is defined as innately fallen (evil), and the bodily flesh being made of matter, is thus also fallen. This is the root in Western culture of everything that has followed, that seeks to separate soul from flesh, that separates "dead matter" from "living spirit," that has led to every branch of Christianity that is more rational than sensual. In philosophy, it is the root of mind-body dualism, as expressed by Descartes and many others. This separation of body from spirit is particularly true of the Protestant sects: the Catholics at least maintained, until the present era, the spectacle of the Mass as theatre, with incense, special lighting, and special sounds.

If you read the criticism and reviews and assessments of Whitman from his first publications through, say, the 1950s, you are confronted with this issue again and again. Whitman's eroticism is central to his work—eroticism in the sense of eros, the life-force, the greening, the fecundity, the Green Man, the Great God Pan—and is what makes Whitman still radical. Even those who defended him, as D.H. Lawrence did, must confront the mind-body dualism split in our culture, defending Whitman as one who transcends that division, who addresses it only to pass beyond its limits, who defies the conventional wisdom.

Any Lowell thought Whitman wasn't Modern enough—by which she means, not Imagiste enough. (There are few points on which I agree with Ezra Pound on any subject of discussion; but his criticisms of Lowell's ideologies are spot-on.) Lowell accepts Whitman as a precursor of the Modern(ist) poetry of her era, but she portrays Whitman as a failure relative to what her poet-contemporaries were achieving. This isn't standing on the shoulders of giants; it's spitting from on high.

Even Emerson and Thoreau, Whitman's early champions, backpedalled after the 1860 edition of Leaves, which was the most sexually explicit and erotic edition; and from which Whitman did back off, over time. It's not just the "Calamus" poems that are problematic; it's also the "Children of Adam" poems, which are equally erotic; although in "Children of Adam" Whitman wears the poetic persona of a lover of women, just as he is explicit about loving men in "Calamus." These poems remain radical, original, and daring. Not because culture has changed since Whitman wrote—rather, because it hasn't, all that much.

In his most important book, The Varieties of Religious Experience (1902), the American philosopher William James discussed Whitman in order to discredit some of the myths of the "natural man" that had grown up around him—and which Whitman himself constructed and promoted, of course. James wrote:

Walt Whitman owes his importance in literature to the systematic expulsion from his writings of all contractile elements. The only sentiments he allowed himself to express were of the expansive order; and he expressed these in the first person, not as your mere monstrously conceited individual might so express them, but vicariously for all men, so that a passionate and mystic ontological emotion suffuses his words, and ends by persuading the reader that men and women, life and death, and all things are divinely good.

Thus it has come about that many persons to-day regard Walt Whitman as the restorer of the eternal natural religion. He has infected them with his own love of comrades, with his own gladness that he and they exist. Societies are actually formed for his cult; a periodical organ exists for its propagation, in which the lines of orthodoxy and heterodoxy are already beginning to be drawn; hymns are written by others in his peculiar prosody; and he is even explicitly compared with the founder of the Christian religion, not altogether to the advantage of the latter.

Whitman is often spoken of as a "pagan." The word nowadays means sometimes the mere natural animal man without a sense of sin; sometimes it means a Greek or Roman with his own peculiar religious consciousness. In neither of these senses does it fitly define this poet. He is more than your mere animal man who has not tasted of the tree of good and evil. He is aware enough of sin for a swagger to be present in his indifference towards it, a conscious pride in his freedom from flexions and contractions, which your genuine pagan in the first sense of the word would never show.

James goes on to discuss what he terms "the religion of healthy-mindedness," both in terms of a naturally positive attitude and in terms of the conscious suppression of the negative. He believed Whitman to be a conscious suppressor of the unhealthy-minded and negative, and so did not accept him as a classic "pagan" and visionary poet.

But in fact Whitman, like Robert Frost, another oft-misinterpreted poet, contained almost as much shadow as light. There are many poems in Leaves of Grass which are set at night. There are dream passages in several of the longer poems, which do not suppress the nightmarish even if the poem's narrator moves to comfort, as in "The Sleepers":

I stand in the dark with drooping eyes by the worst-suffering and the most restless,
I pass my hands soothingly to and fro a few inches from them,
The restless sink in their beds, they fitfully sleep.

The "Calamus" poems are as much about regret and loss and unfulfilled yearning as they are about radical loving. (The poems in which the lovers are content with one another are incandescent in part because they stand out in high relief from their darker backgrounds.) As with Frost, there are layers of darkness and suffering hidden beneath the surface that seems so light-filled and positive. Many of these darknesses, these mysteries, in both poets have to do with the body, its desires and losses, its demands and splendors, with loving and with death. The body's night magic is an experience of liminal opening to space and time; not exclusively sexual, but not denying sexuality. And death is the ultimate threshold experience.

Here is the remarkable, oneiric third section of "The Sleepers," a memorably dramatic and frightful vision, its archetypal tone common to many of Whitman's poems:

I see a beautiful gigantic swimmer swimming naked through the eddies of the sea,
His brown hair lies close and even to his head, he strikes out with
     courageous arms, he urges himself with his legs,
I see his white body, I see his undaunted eyes,
I hate the swift-running eddies that would dash him head-foremost on the rocks.

What are you doing you ruffianly red-trickled waves?
Will you kill the courageous giant? will you kill him in the prime
     of his middle age?

Steady and long he struggles,
He is baffled, bang'd, bruis'd, he holds out while his strength holds out,
The slapping eddies are spotted with his blood, they bear him away,
     they roll him, swing him, turn him,
His beautiful body is borne in the circling eddies, it is
     continually bruis'd on rocks,
Swiftly and ought of sight is borne the brave corpse.

This passage is both sensual and erotic, and also nightmarish. The body of the giant swimmer, crushed on the rocks, is archetypal, mysterious, not fully comprehensible to the rational mind. To illustrate this section of this poem, we might call on Salvador Dali more appropriately than on N.C. Wyeth. On some subconscious and hallucinatory level, perhaps, the poet has discovered a profound symbol for the denigration of the body itself. (I cannot know if this interpretation is justified; nonetheless it seems apt in the context of discussing Whitman's rebellion against the cultural suppression of the body.)

The Augustinian and Christian roots of the denial of the body are explicitly addressed by German theologian Elizabeth Moltmann-Wendel in her thoughtful and luminous book, I Am My Body: A theology of embodiment (1994). She writes, in a section titled "The body and the church":

[M]any people are aware of the way in which Christianity distorts the body, and this already begins with the rituals of the church. Penned into the pews, Protestant Christians above all experience that in worship their heads, their ears or perhaps their wills have been addressed, but nothing else. Unfortunately isolated hearing also leads to fatal obedience.

This was precisely my experience of the Lutheran church in my childhood. What redeemed it was the music, which was often sublime and liminal. Lutheran theology is excellent in terms of its reason and logic, and many of the great theologians have been Lutherans. But there is no room in this for mystical experiences, for body-prayers, for the experience of sexuality as another sacrament. (It is always wise to remember that Luther himself was a reactionary reformer, more conservative than progressive, more political than mystical.)

For some people prayer with closed eyes seems like a flight from the world. "It is remarkable," writes the Latin American liberation theologian Ruben Alves, "that we close our eyes to pray. Anxiety about the body? Are we fleeing from the body . . . ? We close our eyes are look inwards—in search of a spirit. But the spirit of God is in things, in bodies, in creation and above all in the laughing and weeping of children and those who suffer."

I don't remember when it was, that I began to pray with eyes open, raised to the ceiling, rather than with eyes closed and head bowed. I feel a great deal of sympathy for Alves' questions here. It is suitably ironic that liberation theology, and Alves, were eventually suppressed by the Catholic Church and deemed heretical. There has always been a strain of creation-centered spirituality in Christianity, and it is profoundly Biblical; it often is intertwined with the history of mysticism, almost inseparably linked to the experience of revelation and enlightenment. Spiritual ecstasy was not historically divorced from physical ecstasy—except by later church doctrine.

Is it not precisely this repression and denial of the physical experience of ecstasy that Whitman was rebelling against? "I Sing the Body Electric" remains a radical statement, beginning with the poem's title. Whitman has been placed in the company of religious mystics by more than one of his readers. (Literary critics, always careful to appear rational and objective, tend to avoid this discussion entirely. Most lit-crit remains more Apollonian than Dionysian, more Protestant than ecstatic.)

But the repression of the body and its innate wisdom is disastrous. Moltmann-Wendel quotes Swiss psychotherapist Annie Berner-Hürbin on precisely this point:

Church history is a telling example of the dangers of being imprisoned in the negative and the loss of numinous powers of life which runs parallel to this: whether there is still enough power in the material of the Christian tradition for it finally to allow or even encourage comprehensive subtle relationships or, if this is impossible, to give itself relevant help could be decisive for its survival—in whatever form.

What William James misread in his analysis of Whitman was that Whitman's positive attitude was not in denial of the experience of horror and suffering, but was rather deeply rooted in such experiences. Whitman, after all, nursed the sick and dying during the Civil War, and had numerous other direct encounters with the darker parts of life. Of course, James himself wrote movingly, also in The Varieties of Religious Experience, about the via negativa, the dark night of the soul, and of his own depression and experiences of an existential void, of his sense that life was at root meaningless. It is perhaps understandable that a depressive such as James, who has been through the dark night, might think Whitman was trying to avoid or deny the dark night. Yet it seems to clear to me that Whitman experienced his own shadow times, his own spiritual crises, his own dark night—and this is precisely what led him to write about the beauty and glory of life.

Not in denial of the shadow, but as a way of overcoming it.

Whitman did not deny the darker parts of life—they seep into many of the poems, no matter what—but he chose not to dwell upon them. It is typical of James and his followers, in their attitudes towards psychology, that they often seem unable to perceive the dynamics of overcoming suffering, and interpret overcoming only as denial or repression. As if the world contained only bleakness. As if, not only is there no light, there is not even the possibility of light.

Of course a great deal of contemporary literature has bought into precisely this belief: that the negative is somehow more real, more true, more honest, than the positive. This is a very Modern attitude. You see it in criticism all the time. All post-Modernism adds to this belief is a wink and a smirk: not solutions to the dilemmas of suffering, but complicit engagement with suffering that presumes it to be normative. The post-Modernists didn't solve the existential crises of Modern life: they merely gave in and gave up the fight. Thus we have made a habit of believing that only the bad things that happen to those we care about are authentic experiences, while we dismiss all good things (which must come to an end) as Polllyannaish and unreal.

Yet the body is a source of suffering.

Some will immediately leap to the conclusion that I refer to the doctrine of the flesh being inferior to the spirit, of being somehow wrong and evil, and dragging the spirit down. But what I mean is that suffering arises from the body in part because the body fails, because life is ephemeral, and eventually we all must die. The suffering comes from our attachments to ideas of perfect physical health, of presumptive physical immortality (an attitude which leads even medicine to view death as unnatural, as a disease that might be cured, if only we knew how), and we judge our physical existence so harshly because it doesn't live up to our desires and expectations.

Buddhist thought is often misunderstood in the West to be life-denying, to be nihilistic, to be body-negative. But this is a typically Western misreading, which tries to shove Buddhist thought into the frame of Augustinian fall/redemption ideology. In fact, the Buddha never judges the body as evil, and never says that the body was the cause of suffering: what he said was that our attachments and our expectations are what cause suffering. Suffering is very much a mental and emotional state. Prolonged suffering can have profound effects on the body, it's true; but even those persons who live with chronic pain will testify that their attitudes towards life are what make all the difference. There are those who are in pain who do not suffer. It is our attachments to what we think life should be like, when confronted with the dissonant experience that life is often not like that at all—it is these attachments to what we think life should like, rather than accepting it as it is, that creates suffering. Whitman exemplifies radical acceptance of things just as they are. As the Zen teachers say, "Just sit!"

It is typical of James and his followers in both philosophy and psychology (two disciplines in which the intellect tends to strongly dominate) to completely miss this point: they get stuck on what life ought to be like, and often miss completely what is like. It is the frustrated idealist, the child who has lost the belief that the universe is inherently good, that has lost all innocence, who then tends to define existence as inherently bleak and bad.

This is not to deny suffering. But what James missed about Whitman was that Whitman was not denying suffering—rather, he was choosing not to dwell on it. He chose to expand beyond suffering, rather than contract into it.

And we are the heirs of William James, and the history of the ideas of psychology, as much as we are the heirs of the history of Christian theology. We still tend to view the body as tainted, as a problem to be overcome, rather than an experience to be embraced. Whitman remains radical because he embraced all of life—even those parts you or I might not approve of. Whitman remains provocative because he does not disregard any part of life, but includes it all. Even the famous "i" in Whitman is not Whitman's own ego, but stands in for all of us: a larger, more universal "I" than most philosophers and psychologists (and the literary critics who swim in their wakes) comprehend. The "I" in "Song of Myself" is all of us. Whitman might start out from his own experience, but he immediately universalizes the poem, and includes the rest of existence within his frame.

In this Whitman is again erotic. This large embrace of all of life, which the creative life-force has brought into being, into dancing, is what eros is, what eros means. This is the eroticism of everyday life, of everything in unitive coexistence. Confocal and copresent, we, if we dare, are invited to set out upon that road together, arm in arm with Whitman, and all he embodies.

Walt Whitman's Summer Wander Across North America

Walt Whitman is watching the young men again, where they play a sandlot baseball game in windy green-hilled Iowa in early summer.
Walt Whitman is silently watching the game, his eye following every catch, and lusting in his heart after the long clean limbs exposed to the open air, the strong wrists and thighs of the players, their bent backs and arcing shoulders as they throw or pause in running between the bases.
He is sitting in the top row of bleachers at Wrigley Field, at Shea Stadium, his eyebrows leaping as the crowds surge and dance with every action of the players on the field.
He is standing unobserved behind the chain-link fence around a basketball court in Oklahoma City. It's a sunny humid
summer afternoon and the boys have taken off their shirts as they dance with the ball, their shoulders and flanks
and thighs and breasts and white-socked ankles slick with their own sweat, a sheen of mist on the body
catching the gold-amber light of the setting sun.
Walt Whitman is watching the dark-skinned and and brown-skinned boys sitting on the neighborhood stoops
in Chicago and East LA and Detroit, just hanging out doing nothing, their mocking laughter ringing out
and echoing off the brownstone windows across the way. He knows the long future
belongs to all the brown and tan black-haired people, and is glad.
He spends his early summers in the silver waterfalls of the Finger Lakes in New York.
He sets out on the open road from his city home in New York, and spreads his gaze
across the many roads West and North and South from his Long Island home.
Walt Whitman sets out on the open road late each spring and wanders all summer, watching the men and boys
play their summer games.
He sits under a shade umbrella at poolside in every suburban metro swimming pool in the Great Plains states,
where the young men and old men and their sisters and mothers reveal their near-nudity to the sun and endless wind, and frolic
in the clean clear blue chlorinated waters while the lifeguard in his red skimpy shorts watches over all with his whistle and gaze, his sunburned nose smeared with white zinc oxide cream.
Walk Whitman wanders down the street in a small town in Idaho where the skateboarding boys
jump their boards again and again on the concrete and steel of the public library steps
till some authority figure chases them away, and they return again after an hour's pause for sodas and rest.
He sits on a boulder at the south fork of the American River near Auburn California where all the swimmers, men and women, remove
their clothing to frolic nude in the whitewater deep swimming holes, the root-beer foam below the falls.
He watches the swimmers play unselfconciously under the cliffs and boulders, emerging with wet foreheads that shine radiantly in the noon sun. He watches them lie back
to sun themselves dry on the flat sheets of stone.
Walt Whitman contemplates the naked torsos of the men and women he sees all across North America, revealed to the summer sun, in heat haze or blaze of light, and loves them equally as the beautiful expressions of physical grace that lasts only a few brief summers before growing stolid or flabby.
He marvels at the perfect form of the human collarbone, the heart beating beneath, the ribs expanding with short deep athletic breath.
He sees the naked muscles and long limbs of the bathers and athletes and sees in their revelation of their own flesh a godlike animal beauty
made more sensual still when flung into wild motion.

Walt Whitman sets out on the long roads every summer in search of the naked and near-naked beauty of men revealed in play, in hope, in forgetfulness of winter and inwardness, each summer the world made open anew.
Walt Whitman seeks a revelation of the sunbright beauty of the godbody-self in every place he visits along his sojourn.
He finds it in the western slot canyons where only the adventurous hike, to finally strip off their sweat-soaked shirts and dive into the clear still pools of rainwater that rush down from the mountain steppes.
He finds it in the shallow rivers, banked and hidden behind groves of aspen and maple
where someone has hung a rope tire swing over a blackwater swimming hole
just upstream of a small Wisconsin farm town.
He finds it at Coney Island, where the beach is covered with swarms of city people escaping the smog on a Sunday afternoon,
with ice cream stands and carnival rides and puffy white clouds overhead.
He finds it south of San Francisco, at the gay nude beach between two coastal state parks, sheltered
by cliffs and open to the Pacific Ocean, with tunneled caves in the rock formations at the north end
where men steal together nude for hidden trysts as the surf washes their ankles and thighs.
He finds it at a placid beach inside Florida's Gulf Coast, on a grey day under a grey sky
before hurricane season has reached its peak, with a stiff wind
raising goosebumps on the arms and breasts of boys and girls playing together making sand castles.
He finds it under spreading ferns along the Appalachian Trail.
He finds it where the white-flanked magpies soar over the Rio Grande canyon in New Mexico, the whitewater
rafters have pulled into shore, beaching their Kevlar inflatables to serve the midday meal, suddenly
in the heat everyone has stripped off their clothes to dive into the refreshing cold waters,
their shouts echoing back and forth on the canyon walls.
He finds it at a hidden geothermal spring in Wyoming, in Oregon, in Montana, where the scalding waters rise to make a pool
hidden down a dirt road a few miles off the state two-lane highway stitching itself
across the long arid highlands.
He finds it at an isolated mountain stream at Granite Pass in the Bighorn Mountains, at the Temperance River above Lake Superior in Minnesota, around the curve of sheltered trout waters near the headlands of the Hudson River in the Adirondacks.
He finds it wherever overheated outdoor summer hikers and trout fisherman stop for a moment to bathe nude in the refreshing cool waters.
He finds it where the young men race their bicycles in Illinois.
He finds it at the top of a gold sandstone cliff overlooking the highway hundreds of feet below at the apex of a long slickrock trail in Utah, in Arizona, in Texas.
He finds it on a flooded state park trail in southern Indiana after heavy rains have spilled the river over its banks, where young men
take off their clothes to wade in the hot dappled shade and catch with their hands fish swimming around the bases of threes.
He finds it along the desert Rio Grande where owls watch nude swimmers cross at midnight, arriving as pilgrims to Gold Mountain to begin the long dry walk towards a dream of freedom.
He finds it under an overhang of shelfrock in Tennessee where a small stream waterfall cascades into the deep gorge
and undercuts the cliff just far enough for two to sit together and hold hands.
He finds it on a 100 degree day in Brooklyn when the city opens up a fire hydrant so the neighborhood kids can soak themselves and play in the cool high-pressure water for half an hour.
He finds it at the foot of the sinuous Henry Moore bronze in city hall plaza in Toronto, where tourists run with their children between attractions and views while young businessmen loosen their ties and sit crosslegged to eat their lunches.
He finds it under the shelter of a shade tree hanging over the Brandywine River in Pennsylvania, where a group of college students have drifted out of the sun after rafting all morning in oversize truck innertubes. The day has stilled,
the air completely calm, everywhere is silence in which tufts of cottonwood seed float in the air, and a humming cicada call only deepens the silence. After a long nap, the young men wake at the same moment, and with no words passing between them, look into each other's eyes and as if with one will strip off their remaining clothes and float nude into the river current, only to fall back in couples under the shade other trees reaching out over the river bank, and come together, and kiss.

Walt Whitman knows how the summer heat rises through the long limbed flesh and roots in the loins,
making the heart race and the eyes widen as the Great God Pan wanders like a wind-devil tornado
through the dusty streets, over the riverbank, in an empty city lot, among the wild mustangs of the
wide basins between tall ranges.
Walt Whitman knows that at any moment the langorous afternoon nap might waken into erotic self-pleasure, and afterwards lapse back into a deeper sea of sleep.
Walt Whitman knows from long contemplation that love is inescapable.
What Whitman knows with every fiber of his being that it doesn't matter who you love, only that you Love.

Your hope and love haven't been lost, Walt Whitman, although many poets and graffiti artists
imagine it's been betrayed and buried under decades of swill and hate and war.
Your love and honor haven't died, Walt Whitman, not even where people have forgotten how to understand and forgive each other.
Your courage and your still-radical freedom haven't been murdered, Walt Whitman, not even by the worst efforts of corporate greed and political corrupt fear-mongering and religious homophobia and fear of the earth-rooted strength of the women.
Your message and your living will endure, Walt Whitman, wherever lovers or strangers take off their clothes and reveal themselves naked to each other across the shieldlands of North America, wherever they emerge wet and shining from the waters, wherever they sweat their prayers in ecstatic dance.
Your love and your lustful gaze can never fade away or be concealed, Walt Whitman, wherever lovers or strangers merge, body mind and spirit, in the erotic lifelove sensual eternal dancing force of the worship and oneness of nature, of nature striding like coyote packs through even the most unnatural technological quarters of the naked cities, wherever Pan arises to disturb your universe, wherever lovers or strangers meet to look into each other, to kiss the splendor of each other's hearts eyes lips shoulders breasts thighs fingers knees and napes of neck.

Walt Whitman stands unobserved watching the erotic play of the tall prairie grass and sunflowers against the red sky of South Dakota evening.
He invisibly caresses the hair of joggers in Central Park.
His spirit rests silently on the Indian burial mounds of southern Ohio.
He walks between the tall pines never logged in central Michigan and contemplates the upraised prayer faces of shaded trillium.
He smiles upon Lake Erie as it returns to unpolluted life brimful with perch and returning salmon.
He leans against a basalt hexagon above Yellowstone Falls and watches the eagles cavort and play.
Walt Whitman sighs near the end of afternoon, and open his arms to wrestle with dandelions.
He says nothing to the ditch-lilies emerging orange near the railroad tracks.
He shakes his head and smiles at the play of water-sprinklers on the unnatural lawns of retired Arizona.
He strolls unseen along the streets of Minneapolis.
Walt Whitman wanders along the summer blue highways till at last he stops to watch a pickup game in the last light of summer's end, in the heat of the night, where the dusk picks out
the last reflected sheen of stars on wet skin and heaven looks down on the poet at last at peace, his breast
full of visions memories and cherished locker-room smells.
Walt Whitman sleeps through the winter and rises again, a god of summer, to watch
again the young men play through their lives in the heat and lingering sunlight
and sweat of long summer evenings.

•

I was sitting on my porch in the mid-morning drinking my orange juice and reading Thomas Keating on contemplative prayer and the practice of Lectio Divina, when I put the book down, and sat watching the sunlight warm the lawn, the breeze quivering the pear tree's leaves, when this poem started to form in my mind. Words started to appear, full sentences already written. I immediately sat down to write, and out it poured for an hour, writing itself at white heat. Then I stepped away from it for awhile, to let it sit, and came back to it again and again during the day. I added to it, revised it, changed it, let it tell me the shapes of each section, emerging from the blank page of its own will, in its own timing. Throughout the day I have listened for more, and a few more words have arisen. Throughout the day I've sat down to read through the poem again from its beginning, and change a word or phrase here and there, clarify a line, add a detail, subtract a useless adjective. I'll probably come back to it and revise it some more, as time passes; to clean up its form, to smooth out any rough spots, to makes sure all the joints connect properly. First the overwhelming white heat surge dump impulse of first writing; and later the carpenter-like craft of shaping the given words to flow with the grain rather than against it.

Ode to Walt Whitman

After a year of continual dying, of ending both sudden and lingering,
the deaths of parents, the death of a life once lived, no place to go now,
a long year of being nothing to myself, but of washing the dying, and their homes,
after years of dangerous solitary migration across mountains and by an ocean,
across a world in exile in a homeless truck, a whistling trailer disintegrating
airborne in sudden wind, the alembic travel of a nomadic anchorite,
after years of wandering homeless, camping in deserts and by oceans,
years living nowhere before living too much here, of too much giving,
I turn to you, Walt Whitman.

You remind me, every time I see your beard in the grocery aisles
checking out the stock boys, you tell me, whenever I see you giving me
a strong look across a crowded station before disappearing through the turnstiles,
you leave me stranded, these late nights I can't get home, Walt,
then reel me in with your naked laugh.

After the ecstasy, poet, the laundry. Washing dishes before bed,
already undressed, I see your eyes glint outside the kitchen window,
sparking reflections, peeping Walt, daring me to come back to life.
To dare to love again, after these months
living with death, the dead, these tables left behind.
There's your face in a scrapbook my grandmother gathered, long buried
in a trunk that's been to India and back—my own passage to India, Walt,
more literal than yours, my childhood browning in that sun; not your sun,
but still the same sun—buried in the winter basement next to
her scrapbooks of Lincoln memorabilia.
There are lilacs on the black pages where he lay.
I see your likeness, poet, in the overcast cafés
of winter-locked midwestern smalltowns. Here's your portrait in effigy
above the science fiction section of a used book store. You look down on me
in bathrooms, scrawling graffiti in the johns of heaven,
slow smiles in the long beards of aging lovers.

Walt Whitman, your beard drips white dew.
Your young Irish lover in his jaunty bowler hat has strolled the aisles
of thrift stores here, leaving his hat behind. Your gray woolen coat hung
on the rack at Goodwill, your gray trousers are missing.
Still your scent lingered in the air, Walt Whitman, and the sounds of birds
that once lived in the sheaves of the great gray poet’s beard.

Walt Whitman, I look for reasons
to go on. I have sought to live in grasslands, in wastelands, in wilderness,
now that I have only myself to live for. I think of you wherever eros
and thanatos intersect, wherever ekstasis
seems to surge greenly forward. I think of you when I cruise
the priest at the funeral, when I get an erection in the library,
at the supermarket. I think of you whenever I feel the urge of life
in my testes loins and genitals beating back that bitter neutron tide of entropy.
Lately when I am massaged, erotic and naked together,
I know I am feeling the lifeforce sap rising through me
so that death shall have no dominion, and death shall have
no dominion over sex and life and lifelove—this urge
to ecstasy is a direct path towards rebirth, a trajectory of the rejection
of what old shame would not let me invite you into this new life, this greening,
this opening of the portals of the mystery of hope.

Let me speak as freely as you, Walt Whitman: let me shout
my loud barbaric yawp from the rooftops of the world, that
I have loved men as you loved men, not excluding women
who I have also loved, before. I want to celebrate,
to masturbate, to agitate, not cogitate.

Sex is rebellion against death.
Whenever I make love to myself I think of you, Walt Whitman.
When I look at the waiters in restaurants and country clubs, I am cruising
in your name’s bold honor. When I lay naked and spent
in silent minutes after sex with my lover, Walt Whitman,
you are laying with us. When we enfold each other
in our arms after making love, you are there with us, laying with us,
watching over us, breathing with us, running your phantom hands across
our cooling thighs. Your legs twine together with ours.

I dedicate my next dozen orgasms to you, poet of life and rebirth,
poet of comrades together, of walking naked under clear summer skies—
each greening wave launches a new created tree of life
across nebulous illumined space into exploding worldbringers
spreading life in sparking quanta, falling fire rain, created songs
of generative outcries.

                              You came,
you ogled the boys playing basketball
mostly shirtless in the sweat of summer evenings,
you saw, you arrived stepping off ferry boats
into the press of the throng, you conquered
every heart in the breasts you touched, male and female
you created them, all in love with you did you create them,
Walt, all of us loved you, even rejection itself just love
turned backwards into spite yet still threaded
through that same needle of connection
you sung about, out of the cradle, captain, and fallen
back into death to lay between two sleepers swimming
an ocean, saying your name in the capital, in their sleep.

Walt Whitman, I envy you. You're more free now than ever.
Your voice has not been silenced but sings through
every boy and girl first loving, first striding a road away
from home, first discovering each other, first wedding
themselves to field flower rapture sun-shrugged rain.
You continue to sing, Walt, some days you won't be quiet.

Your voice in my hearing too young, perhaps,
I stepped out as early as I could, you embraced me, in Calamus, to speak
as I would speak, not as others would demand I speak.
There is no closet that can fold us in, Walt Whitman,
we are making love to remind ourselves we are still alive.

Walt Whitman, are you watching me naked now and again?
Are you watching the bathers in the rivers of heaven?
Do the wounded soldiers you bathed and read to visit you still?
Do you look down on the bathers in today's riverine swimming holes?
I admire you, poet, for celebrating this body of life.
I want to be with you in heaven, Walt Whitman,
admiring your vitality and endurance.

I am stretching forth my own body
to be one with you, Walt Whitman,
and to be embraced by you all night,
all mourning passed by, overturned.
I am making love to you, poet of love,
with words I come to you,
to be with you,
to be alive,
always,
again.

Odysseas Elytis

I am particularly fond of the modern Greek poets such as Constantine Cavafy, Angelos Sikelianos, George Seferis, and Odysseas Elytis. All of them are richly tied to the ancient Greek past while also being completely modern. It's a doubled stance that few other modern poets have carried off; perhaps only Octavio Paz and Pablo Neruda have equalled this feat.

Elytis was a poet of deep ekstasis, as political as Neruda in his thirst for justice, but always lyrical and sun-drenched. He even talks about the impact of the sun on Greek poetry, and in his poetry.

One thing I find very congenial in Elytis is his ability to stay within the tradition of the Greek poets while also being deeply experimental, and arranging poems in ways you've never seen before. He constantly creates new forms for his work, but they are so connected to the subject matter that they seem to grow from within, organically, and even though they are new they seem completely natural and right. (This is an acknowledged influence on my own poetry.)

•

Burnished day, conch of the voice . . .

Burnished day, conch of the voice that fashioned me
Naked, to step through my perpetual Sundays
Between the shores’ cries of welcome,
Let your wind, known for the first time, blow freely
Unfold a lawn of tenderness
Where the sun can roll his head
Can enflame the poppies with his kiss
Poppies nourished by men so fine
That the sole mark on their bare chests
Is the blood of defiance that annuls sorrow
And attains the remembrance of liberty.

I spoke of love, of the rose’s health, of the ray
That by itself goes straight to the heart,
Of Greece that steps so surely on the sea
Greece that carries me always
Among naked snow-crowned mountains.

I give my hand to justice
Diaphanous fountain, sublimest spring,
My sky is deep and changeless
All I love is incessantly reborn
All I love is always at its beginning.

—translation by Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard

•

It is more typical than not that most English-language poets do not know this poet, or these poems. It's unfortunately very typical that English-language poets rarely know much about non-English poets.

A great deal depends on the translator. In my opinion, the best translators are poets themselves, with an ear for sound and rhythm and music. Perhaps many English-language poets are afraid of investing the time it takes to learn to translate poems properly. I learned enough German in graduate school to begin to do my own translations of Rilke. I was fluent enough in Indonesian, when I lived there, that I was able to read great poets such as Chairil Anwar in the original. I studied French for many years, enough to be able to read St.-Exupery and Voltaire in the original. This was years ago, in my school days, and I regret none of hte time spent on it, even though I'm out of practice now, and doubt I could do as good a job anymore.

Elytis' tone is often elegiac: the past exists for him as though a living image, a living place, still present in us now. This is another tone and topic that's common to many of the great modern Greek poets. Yet I find it continually fascinating that Elytis can say old things in such new, living language. He makes you feel it in your body, and your eyes are blinding by that Aegean sunlight.

•

Gift, Silver Poem

I know that all this is worthless and that the language
I speak doesn't have an alphabet

Since the sun and the waves are a syllabic script
which can be deciphered only in the years of sorrow and exile

And the motherland a fresco with successive overlays
frankish or slavic which, should you try to restore,
you are immediately sent to prison and
held responsible

To a crowd of foreign Powers always through
the intervention of your own

As it happens for the disasters

But let's imagine that in an old days' threshing-floor
which might be in an apartment-complex children
are playing and whoever loses

Should, according to the rules, tell the others
and give them a truth

Then everyone ends up holding in his
hand a small

Gift, silver poem.

—translation by Marios Dikaiakos

•

For modern Greek poetry, Edmund Keeley and Philip Sherrard are one of the best translating teams around. They have done Complete Poems of Cavafy and Seferis, and several anthologies of others. Another really excellent translator from the Greek is Kimon Friar; his Modern Greek Poetry anthology is over a thousand pages of good reading. Friar was also the chief translator into English of the novels and essays and letters of Nikos Kazantzakis, the writer of Zorba the Greek and The Odyssey: A Modern Sequel, among many other well-known works.

Sikelianos is under-translated in English. I would like to see a Collected Poems in translation someday. One of my favorite poems of his is The Sacred Way.

For Elytis, Copper Canyon Press has several of his books translated by Olga Broumas, a Greek-born American poet in her own write. Copper Canyon has also put out spoken word CDs of some of their poets. I have one of Hayden Carruth reading from his collected shorter poems that is terrific. The Olga Broumas CD from this series contains both her own poems, and her translations of Elytis. I have seen her give readings, and she's really good at performing the poems; she almost always reads some Elytis as well as her own poems. I think her Elytis translations are luminous and exalted.

Seferis and Elytis were both awarded the Nobel Prize for Literature. That's one reason they're well-translated, while Sikelianos isn't as well-known. There is a Sikelianos Collected Poems in Greek, but it hasn't yet been fully translated into English. By contrast, there are two Elytis Collected Poems by different translators, that I know of, and three different Collected Poems of Cavafy, and also two of Seferis. Sikelianos is, of this group of modern Greek poets, in some ways a quiet mystic, with a quieter voice. But all of them are Greek to the core. English poet Rex Smith has done a few excellent translations of Seferis; they were friends, too. Seferis openly admitted to having been strongly influenced by T.S. Eliot, but what he did with that influence, in Greek, was I think very original, and not at all dour or despairing the way Eliot could be.

The one Elytis anthology to have, if you can only have one, is Eros, Eros, Eros, which is a selected and last poems anthology, which also contains some extracts from Open Papers, a book-length essay in which Elytis writes incredibly poetic prose about poetry, his writing habits, his sources, and much more; it's like a poet's journal, but exalted and filled with bright sunlight. Truly inspirational.

Elytis wrote this in Open Papers, and it stands for me as one of the best artist's statements of all time:

Don’t think me exalted; I’m not referring to myself; I speak for whoever feels as I do and is not naive enough to confess it. If a separate personal Paradise exists for each of us, I reckon mine must be irreparably planted with trees of words the wind silvers like poplars, by people who see their confiscated justice given back, and by birds that even in the midst of the truth of death insist on singing in Greek and saying, “eros, eros, eros.”

Erotica vs. Pornography

The old ironic joke goes: The difference between pornography and erotica is the lighting. As far as that goes, it's true. The question lies in trying to draw distinctions between the two: where do you draw the line? There are subjective elements to making judgments about erotica and porn, but to say that the entire enterprise is subjective goes too far, especially in regard to the creative arts. I think it's certain that judgmentalism about pornography is usually subjective, relative, and culturally-bound. It's less certain that erotica is always porn: because after all eros is after all the life-force itself, and without eroticism there would be no sexuality, no perpetuation of the species, no prostitution, sacred or otherwise, and no millenia of art. Animals rut, and so do many humans; but humans also make art about it all.

I've been having this or similar discussions with other poets and artists lately, because I write homerotic texts, and make homoerotic photos and artwork. I can tell you my personal working definition of where the line lies between eroticism and porn, but that's just mine, nothing definitive.

(Can music be homoerotic? That's the question posed by two compilations of older recordings recently released on CRI, titled Gay American Composers, Vols. I and II. They are excellent compilations, by the way, and have returned to print some of my old favorite vinyl recordings from CRI's back catalogue; CRI is a label devoted entirely to new music, a genuine rarity in the music biz. Composers included on the two CDs include: Henry Cowell, Harry Partch, Samuel Barber, Marc Blitzstein, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, Ben Weber, John Cage, Alwin Nikolais, Robert Helps, Lee Hoiby, Lou Harrison, Chester Biscardi, Ned Rorem, David Del Tredici, Robert Maggio, Conrad Cummings, William Hibbard, Jerry Hunt. The question of homoeroticism in music is implicit more than explicit, yet several of the composers echo my ideas in their artist's statements: these are composers who happen to be gay, rather than "gay composers." On the other hand, if every gay artist, composer, and writer in America suddenly decided to stop working for a week, all at once, there would be a vast echoing silence. Broadway would shut down, so would several TV networks, concert halls, and magazines—and not just the obvious ones. Think about it.)

The problem with commonplace definitions of eroticism and pornography is that they are socially-driven, not artistically. All such socially-driven definitions will remain vague and equivocal in a pluralistic society, wherever diversity is present and not legislated against, and thus rarely be of any real use. The old legal standard of I don't know what pornography is, but I know it when I see it can only carry us so far. In the face of conformist pressure, there is always a tendency to take one's desires underground, into the shadows; which may not serve them in the most healthy way.

I tend to look at eros and pornography through the eyes of an artist. As a photographer, I could say that there is some truth to the joke about lighting, and that would be true. As a writer, I don't find reading pron to be very interesting—it can even be unintentionally hilarious, when it's really badly written. Nothing makes pornography wilt like derisive laughter. On the other hand, eros maintains space for the laughter of joy and pllay. It's easy to define porn as demeaning, as objectifying, as sterile. Yet the Venus de Milo is universal, an objectified vision of the goddess of love (at least that is the meaning accrued to this statue whose origins remain veiled); and other art that includes sexuality, that is considered great art, can demean its subjects, or objectify them, or be emotionally sterile. Perhaps the main difference between erotica and porn is in how you use them, or the amount of emotional connection you feel to the person(s) being represente in the art itself.

As a creative artist:

• I am unable to define anything as pornographic that brings more compassion (love, eros) into the world.

• I am unable to condemn any artwork that brings more lust into the world, if that lust is uplifting (putz aside) rather than exploitative or coercive.

• I am unable to define as pornography anything that heals or enhances relations between persons, or between persons and the world; as opposed to anything that increases alienation or emotional distance from the other.

• I am able to define as pornography that which inspires a misdirection of love/compassion, in the forms of greed, avarice, or pride, or the desire to possess, use, manipulate, and coerce.

As you might deduce, my definitions are contextual and relational, and refer to how the art is used rather than what it contains. Intention matters more than content per se.

As such, these defintions can apply to more than art, and its products. They can apply to science, religion, politics, and everyday life. Is your job erotic (does it enhance your life and compassion) or is it pornographic (does it reduce, demean, or stifle the growth of your personhood)?

The problem of definition lies directly in the lack of clarity between the many uses in English of the word "love." Eros, itself a Greek root word, is also about life-force, the power under life; it does not refer only to sexuality, or sensuality, as is commonly assumed. The Greeks had multiple words for "love," in its different manifestations, including some with unavoidable overlap: eros, agape, storge, philokalia, and more. These words are discussed in theology regularly, but poetry rarely; that theological arguments often underlie attacks on pornography should come as no surprise. In theology, the Greek roots are often defined as sexual love (eros), family love (storge), brotherly or companionship love (philokalia), and spiritual or altruistic love (agape). I think you can safely bet which ones are emphasized as the best forms of love in most Abrahmaic theological writings.

But there are other Greek words applicable to this topic: pragma (pragmatic, expedient love), ludus (playful love, and also joyous love), mania (in which the lover is possessed by being in love, unstable, highly emotional—what in Western culture is taken as romantic love, courtly love, obsessive love).

Ludus applies to erotic art, perhaps, while mania might more often apply to pornography: the desire to possess the love-object, or the sexual experience. Ludus is child-like, open to experimentation, and exploratory; I know of people involved in the bondage/discipline/sado-masochism scene who I would call ludus lovers, because their attitudes are entirely open and pleasure-seeking and, well, joyous. (It ain't my scene, personally, but I have friends who are deeply into it, and we've talked about it regularly.) Frankly, mania is given far too much ink in our culture already, because it umbrellas everything from adolescently-impassioned love-letters to stalker movies. This is the legacy of The Art of Courtly Love, and how the assumptions in that model of romantic love continue to play out in our times. (cf. Gail and Snell Putney, The Adjusted American: Normal neuoroses in the individual and society, 1964)

The confusion around mania, as opposed to eros, may lie at the very root of this question of the difference between eroticism and pornography.

The thing to remember about Eros is that it refers to more than sexual love: it is eros that drives us in life. When someone turns to business entrepeneurship, and derives emotional sustenance and fulfillment from it, that person is responding to an erotic urge—although some of those same theologians would call it a misplaced erotic urge, because it is not being used to fuel agape. (This point is highly contestable: in most Western theologies agape is priveleged over all other forms of love, because it brings us closer to God—which is based on the assumption that we are separated from God—whereas the panentheistic mystical tradition, which is a parallel stream in Christianity, says that there is no separation, everything is in God, and everything is God. So, eros is agape, and agape can be expressed via eros. Virtually all of the Christian mystics, as well as mystics from other religious traditions, say this. Then again, most mainstream theologians are bean-counters rather than genuine mystics.) Eros can be responsible for passionate activity in any arena, when we love what we are doing, when we are inspired and completely dedicated to the task at hand. Writing poetry (making music)—the creative act—is itself an erotic activity. For myself, I feel some of my nature/visionary poems are erotically charged, even though they have nothing at all to do with sex or sexuality. Yet they are charged with eros, with passion, with com-passion. Through our voices, we give birth to the words that make the world.

Mania, by contrast, is obsessive and possessive. It cannot let go, and does not want to let go, of the love-object. And I use the word "love-object" deliberately, because mania is always a projection: some image from our own undeveloped self projected onto the "perfect love," "perfect mate," and/or "perfect date" or "perfect romantic partner." Something we think is lacking in ourselves, a lack in us that can only be soothed by possessing the other person or object. Sexuality as a form of empowerment—but never self-empowerment, because mania is always a projection, thus, the maniac is always looking outside themselves to aquire their self-esteem. "My life can only be complete if I acquire the perfecet mate, the perfect kids, the perfect house, the perfect car." Rather than looking within to accomplish the sacred marriage or opposites within one's own self, the maniac looks to others, looks outward, and never looks within.

The maniac is indeed looking outward, but he sees only himself, in that he sees only what he projects, rather than what is actually there. So, in that sense, the maniac is looking inward, because it's all about self-gratification. Different partners every night amounts to masturbation-with-help. All that the sex maniac sees is reflections of his own desire: a world of mirrors.

But the maniac is not looking inward in any genuine way, because this outward projection and mirroring is the only way in which the maniac know himself. Genuine self-contemplation, self-reflection, and self-knowledge are precluded, because to this person all knowledge (and self-worth, and even self-love) come from outside himself, even if all he can see outside himself is the mirrors. The genuine inward journey begins by discarding what we think we know of the world, and giving up those masks and mirrors and projections we place onto the world. Genuine self-knowledge begins with removing those outer masks, and seeing what's actually there. At which point, the person realizes that they are not who they thought they were, and must go inside themselves to see what's really in there, rather than what they assumed was there. It is often a painful and difficult odyssey, because it begins with discovering we are not who we thought we are, and it will reveal to our inner eye every wound we have taken in life—but also every wound we have inflicted on others during our lifetime.

Mania is truly eros defiled, or misdirected love and compassion. Mania leads to power over others, while eros leads to power with. As the saying goes, which would you choose: The love of power, or the power of love?

I can define as pornographic anything that seeks power-over, that enhances the love of power, that projects completion of the sacred marriage onto anything outside the self. Pornography replicates the self via projection. Pornography truly does not see the Other, but only the projected self.

I can define as erotic anything that seeks power-with, that is an appreciation of beauty, that does not seek to own the other but to unite with them as equals, and/or to help them become more fully and beautifully who they already are. Eroticism enhances the self via engagement.

Mania is what drives pornography. Eros is what drives eroticism.

So, it seems to me that part of the confusion around erotica vs. pornography lies in the dearth of useful language with which to talk about it. The I don't know what it is, but I know it when I see it test is not, in the end, either useful or pragmatic, since it invites relativism over concensus, and opinion over discourse.

•

A further distinction between eros and pornography lies in the arena of assumptions about spirit and flesh. An erotic viewpoint tends to view spirit and flesh as one. A pornographic viewpoint tends to view spirit and flesh as separate, and even in battle with one another; this is the legacy of the body-hating, Christian theological, dichotomous worldview templated onto Western culture by Augustine and Paul, although it has its roots in older Platonic Greek thought, and reached its ultimate formulation in Cartesian dualism. Ultimately, in this worldview, since spirit and flesh are not one, flesh is just another form of matter to be exploited. There is no holiness, no sacredness in pornography. The great irony in this is that Christianity was meant to be a religion of inclusive love, not one of hatred, separation, and dualism. But by making spirit holy and flesh unholy, Christian theologians created the very conditions that spawned the pornographic industry so many of them object to.

Matthew Fox says it clearly, I think:

I wonder how many Christians have been invited to meditate on the fact that the word carnal is at the heart of their primary doctrine of Incarnation. Our culture, having been poisoned by negative attitudes toward flesh, is ill at ease with the notion. Indeed, a religious faith that claims to believe that "the word was made flesh" actually denigrates flesh and has turned "flesh" over to the pornographic industries rather than sanctifying it and including it in our spiritual practice. It is time for the ambivalence towards flesh to cease. Either flesh is sacred or it is not. Either the divine is present, incarnated (which literally means "made flesh"), or it is not. If it is not, it is time that worship and education became enfleshed, incarnated, in order to provide a proper home (eikos) for the Divine, which is clearly biased in favor of flesh, having, after all, made it. Our very language is biased agains the flesh: Webster's Dictionary says that the antonym or opposite of carnal is spiritual or intellectual. Here we are, two thousand years after the Incarnation of Jesus, and our language still doesn't get it: that flesh and spirit are one. . . .

The textual revolution that marked the modern era, which began with the invention of the printing press in the fifteenth century, has not been kind to the flesh. Text is not fleshy, but context is. Flesh's brilliance is not easily illuminated on the printed page. Flesh is too colorful for that, too tactile, too full of breath, too soft and yielding to the touch. During the modern era flesh became denigrated in whole new ways—its glory is not of a mathematical and quantitative kind. Flesh is qualitative. Body counts soared during the modern era. Flesh became expendable: human flesh in human wars but also animal flesh and bird flesh and what flesh and fish flesh and soil flesh and forest flesh.

As the modern era's preoccupation with text yields to a postmodern concern for context, perhaps flesh can score a comeback. Perhaps humans can learn to love their flesh anew—and with it the flesh of others on whom we are so dependent and interdependent. —Matthew Fox, Sins of the Spirit, Blessings of the Flesh: Lessons for transforming evil in soul and society, p. 57 ff.

When the body is denigrated and demeaned, so is sexuality and eroticism, and that is what opens the door to pornography. Ironically, without a culturally-proscribed hatred of the flesh, there would be no pornography. Pornography is highly dependent on religion, even when it is explicitly blasphemous.

But eros celebrates. Eros embodies, and sanctifies, and makes holy. Thus, erotic art is celebratory, and erotic poetry is a poetry of praise.