The Scarriet Poetry March Madness has invited the best sex and death poems of all time to participate for 2023.
The challenge is that published poems are not sexy.
And for one major reason.
Poetry, as much as we like to think otherwise, belongs to public, not private expression.
What does this mean, in terms of ‘sex poetry?’
Poetry is moral, precisely because it thrives as a school subject, not as entertainment. The poetry which the educated understand and appreciate as poetry, is taught in school and published by university presses—and publishing houses who know that academia is where the money is.
Byron published sexy poetry—because he was perhaps the last poet who didn’t need to sell in school. He wrote for the public. His poetry—for a short time, anyway—was gobbled up as entertainment. It is no accident, then, that Byron, perhaps more than any other poet, has the reputation of being sexy.
Byron, if he is read at all today, is read in school—selections of his work, therefore, are fit for school. This is true of any sexy poet who wrote centuries ago, before poetry was taken over by the schools—we experience old poetry in what are essentially school books, or books published with an eye to be sold (for profit) in schools.
Poetry is shaped by this fact (as centuries ago, it was influenced by Platonism and religion).
Dirty poetry (as opposed to sexy poetry) is something else together. A dirty limerick, or an unseemly rhyme, will never be seen as poetry by an educated audience.
It should be no surprise to anyone, then, that the 2023 March Madness Sex and Death Poetry tournament features no dirty poetry—and very little sex poetry.
But is this such a bad thing?
If poets cannot overcome a challenge like this, who can?
Combination is the soul of art—what artist cares about only one thing? It is the mixture of the paints, not the paints, which is all.
Sex and morality, by a profound poet mixed: shouldn’t this be a source of never-ending delight?
Of course!
Here is a poem in the Modern Bracket—it came to my attention in a book published by the author in 2007 (Penguin), who 7 years earlier won the Pulitzer Prize in Poetry. Carl Dennis was a professor at U. Buffalo from 1966—when he earned his PhD in California—until 2001. His poetry is day-dreamy, evincing few attachments, family or romantic. He tends to imagine the lives of strangers. His work is about as lonely and dry as one can get—but this is no matter, from what has just been said. In terms of what poetry actually is, as it is practiced today, the following qualifies as a ‘sex and death’ poem, an excellent one, if one reads it with the proper sensitivity:
TO MY BODY
Carl Dennis (b 1939)
If I’ve read your silence correctly,
You’ve never been sullen,
Never resentful I’ve treated you more
As a master treats a servant
Than as friend treats friend.
On the dark day when you’ll be too weak
To obey my wishes, I don’t imagine you
Feeling relieved, glad to be free
Of a partner who failed to understand you.
I suspect you’ll be troubled,
Knowing how lost I’ll be without you.
I know how lucky I am
That you’ve been so patient,
So willing to sit for hours—
Now that your shoulder has almost healed
And the pain in your back has responded to therapy—
Without complaining, motionless
Except for the hand holding the pen.
What can I do, I wonder, while you still
Can bestir yourself for my sake, to show you
I’m not ungrateful. Shall we take off a day
Together soon? Shall we stroll the streets
Or hike in the mountains?
It’s up to you, if you choose the mountains,
Whether we climb to test your limits of breath
And muscle, and embrace exhaustion,
Or linger in a thicket of nuts and berries.
And if we linger, it’s your choice whether we eat,
There and then, all that we gather,
As if that meal would be our last one,
Or save a portion so that tomorrow
Won’t seem ungenerous,
If not so generous as today.
~~~~~~
March Madness 2023
Colombo, Sri Lanka