monday poem #32: Stacy Doris, "Never Sticky."
As a rule, I have terribly bourgeois taste in poetry. I know that language poetry and other experimental forms (styles? I don't even know what to call them) are out there, but what I know about them could be put in a thimble and rattled. I couldn't, for example, actually name anyone currently writing such poetry, or presses that publish it.
But recently the contemporary poetry reading group that I occasionally attend elected to read Stacy Doris's Paramour, which I enjoyed enormously. It's a series of experiments in form linked by a set of themes having to do (as the title suggests) with love, and particularly with the construction of love: the inculcation of gender roles and gendered behaviors as part and parcel of heterosexual romance; the manufacture of the sexually attractive self; the linguistic and emotional differences (or sometimes not) between male and female accounts and experiences of love.
The second section, "How to Love," satirizes not so much ideals of female beauty as the processes by which women are expected to attempt to achieve that ideal. The poems interrelate and work together, so it's frustrating to take them out of context; I've chosen this one partly because it's short and straightforward to reproduce (a couple of the others are quite long, and would be difficult to format properly).
Never Sticky.
The best of all possible words's a luscious mouth
(the rest is dross).
The word-image of a luscious mouth cannot feather or stain
nor pass unnoticed.
The unforgotten mouth, plus high-color fidelity and stamina
break dramatically through
and on soft micro-layers glide.
That saw comfort. In any light, depend.
And along with the dazzling the truth is
you'll want more than one.
- Stacy Doris
from Paramour
But recently the contemporary poetry reading group that I occasionally attend elected to read Stacy Doris's Paramour, which I enjoyed enormously. It's a series of experiments in form linked by a set of themes having to do (as the title suggests) with love, and particularly with the construction of love: the inculcation of gender roles and gendered behaviors as part and parcel of heterosexual romance; the manufacture of the sexually attractive self; the linguistic and emotional differences (or sometimes not) between male and female accounts and experiences of love.
The second section, "How to Love," satirizes not so much ideals of female beauty as the processes by which women are expected to attempt to achieve that ideal. The poems interrelate and work together, so it's frustrating to take them out of context; I've chosen this one partly because it's short and straightforward to reproduce (a couple of the others are quite long, and would be difficult to format properly).
Never Sticky.
The best of all possible words's a luscious mouth
(the rest is dross).
The word-image of a luscious mouth cannot feather or stain
nor pass unnoticed.
The unforgotten mouth, plus high-color fidelity and stamina
break dramatically through
and on soft micro-layers glide.
That saw comfort. In any light, depend.
And along with the dazzling the truth is
you'll want more than one.
- Stacy Doris
from Paramour