| Choosing Poems for Student Workshop by Carrie Becker | ||
"We prefer to shield them from sex," my brother says. He teaches math in a high school with censor chips on its computers. "We prefer that parents talk to them about sex," he explains, "why not try Tennyson, Byron, Keats? Show them where they came from." "They come from sex," I answer. My best friend tells me not to worry. Give them poems about sex, they're having more of it than we are anyway. She remembers those embarrassed talks we couldn't risk face to face. But after years of makeup and bra shopping, of blood and orgasms and gynecologists, we realize our mothers' silence doesn't fit. But even openness has boundaries, and where do we draw the line? I suppose no one would object to the technical terms? But her breasts, his erection, her nipples, his ejaculations? Dick, cock, cunt, pussy? The waters get muddy. One poem compares lust to warm wine. One is a woman envying a man's tucked-in shirttail. One mentions a woman in heat, and another horses. One uses the term "fucked senseless." One talks about the Pope's penis, a gong clapper beneath his robes. Well, Stafford's okay. He's wise. He objected war and only threw animals over the cliff if they didn't stand a chance. And Stanley Kunitz is relatively harmless, if you don't read his early stuff. Mary Oliver writes nature. And some say that's what poetry should be. Rhymed and fenced off in quatrains like dirt fields. And Robert Frost has never offended anyone. (Which offends me.) And he's safe, I suppose, for a class of pubescent students being handed along in conservative schools. So, I'm reading nature poetry, and it tastes like a mouth of dry leaves. Seldom letting on that even nature has sex. That constellations depict shirtless men and clouds take on the shapes of naked women. That pollen is peddled and seeds are planted. And even quirky animals like squirrels and chipmunks lust in their Woody Allen way.
CARRIE BECKER'S poems have appeared in Kalliope, A Journal of Women's Literaature & Art, Cold Mountain Review, Sisters Today, and Sigma Tau Delta's Journal, The Rectangle. This spring her poems were accepted for publication in the 2001 Wisconsin Poet's Calendar and an anthology of poems under the working title Women's Letters to Their Unborn Children. Her essay, Babes: Campus controversy over what to call women was published in the MSN online magazine, Underwire. Click here to read more poems by Carrie Becker in ForPoetry.
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