Journal: Percutio
Cover:
S. Bianciardi |
An
annual published in hard copy in New Zealand and France paying
special attention to the creative process and issues relating
to translation.
Cover:I.A.Goldsmith |
Percutio is dedicated
primarily to reflections upon the creative process, particularly
in relation to work that bridges cultures.
Cover:
N. Bunn |
Percutio may, therefore,
feature poetry, essays, extracts from novels, choreography, approaches
to composition and journal entries in English and the language
of creation.
Cover:A.
Loeffler |
The deadline each year is April 10th.
Submissions are welcome.
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the pilot issue (without images) free of charge here.
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Wellington
poet and musician Bill Direen takes us on a trip through
his own NZ poetry collection, considering
the erotic in N.Z. poetry as it
is revealed in such matters as gardening
and sport...
Georges
Bataille reckons our sense of the
erotic is inseparable from a sense
that we are going to die. If he and
others are right, erotic play is a
dalliance informed by fascination
and fear of death. Erotic play can
be forceful, voyeuristic, dominating,
submissive and above all playful.
It can take place in costume, through
food, in the realm of the spiritual,
through exotic or earthy adventures.
It need not be consummated in the
physical act, but it is consummated
somewhere, in the imagination, in
our dreams, or in the body.
Paul
Verlaine's erotic poems to his partners
of either sex span the erotic spectrum,
from earthy rhymes to spiritual fantasies
of the flesh. Do we New Zealanders,
the 'passionless people', do we yet
have such poets? This article suggests
that we do. The erotic is clearly
discernible in our literature. Let's
start with fantails.
My
own reference to 'fanny tails singing'
in The Builders' underground pop tune
The Alligator Song had its precedents,
as in these lines by Johannes
Anderson, in Christchurch, 1903:
.
. . the gay fantail chatters;
Death
is around it -- what matters?
A
flirt of its fan and it flits
And
over the foaming sits
And
flirts, twits and chatters.
Other
writers of old showed signs of an
awareness of the conflicting demands
of sexuality. Maud Peacock wrote at
the start of the century:
My
heart must throb with each throbbing
string
And
yearn till it break --
.
. . must thrill with a pain that
is ecstasy.
James
K. Baxter was aware of the stereotypes
people had of him,
Some
people think
I
keep a harem. No; my back's not
strong enough.
I
keep a chook pen for birds of paradise.
Te
Whiore o te Kuri 5
while
remaining alive to awakening Eros
in this Rimbaudian poem about a confused
first communicant:
.
. . Christ hides a nude and human
body
She
is yearning, yearning towards the
core of the furnace
Gripping
the pillow tight to smother her
cries
Struggling
in the net of a self-made paradise,
Mouth
wet . . .
The
First Communions
The
girl feels 'a vague wish like the
wind', and we shouldn't forget that
the wind was used to describe the
onset of spiritual occupation when
the Holy Spirit descended on waiting
apostles after the death of Christ.
New
Zealanders love gardening, it is the
perfect activity for channelling our
erotic drives. Consider this poem
by Helen Jacobs, Mayor of Eastbourne:
.
. . I can tell you
that
the small hole
I
put the seedling cineraria in
was
black and wet and smelt of worm-soil
where
soon the head of warm petals will
glow. . .
and
in the wind rush
that
poured through me as I moved from
stooping
a
tug of our days that were creviced
by small things.
Poem
The
erotic and spiritual again combine
in this poem by Anne Donovan, which
is ostensibly about the past-time
of hunting:
Unshriven,
the
sheeting covers and extracts
a
blessing,
a
balance between rot and germination
Leaving
decay
the
raw hole gaping
and
far off, the guffaw of night animals
this
is my body and this is my blood.
Open
Season
Male
violence and the past-time of stock
cars are combined in my only anthologised
poem, one many people know because
the anthology Dangerous Landscapes
was a text popular with secondary
school teachers for more than twenty
years:
through
an open window
the
wind blows their roars to him
and
occasionally
the
unmistakeable whiff of their masculine
pride
Accidental
Death of a Cat
A
lot of kiwi satirical poetry makes
use of sexual imagery for impact.
Sometimes however, the truly erotic
triumphs. In Fiona Kidman's Bulls
Provide Semen for Breeding Programmes
the poet is watching men who are watching
bulls ejaculate, and all but hides
her fascination with the process behind
her satire, were it not that her language
is too highly charged, betraying a
deeper imaginative impulse:
you'd
think wouldn't you`
that
the semen would come gushing out
as
if the creature were
an
All Black champion
.
. . but it comes soundlessly
More
kiwi eroticism surfaces in spite of
our famous self-apologetics. The passionless
covering, the puritanical veneer,
the need to legitimise any inexplicable
desire or impulsive fascination has
resulted win some shadowy deals with
the muse, as in this strange combination
of revulsion and appetite of Ian Wedde:
Where
I went for watercress stank of cattle
but
I wanted it (metaphor)
From
One Centre
Jane
Bowron proves to be impatient with
the bestial nature of alcoholic mating
behaviour, but is there not another
impatience underlying her words:
What
does spunky mean? I ask
There's
a nice awkward silence
I
volunteer, do you mean one who oozes
seminal fluid?
Another
drink arrives
I'm
beginning to enjoy myself.
He
Leans Over
Compare
this with these lines by Linda Earle,
whose speaker is lucky to have found
stereotypical sexual display combining
with her own less explicable attraction:
When
I met D
it
was many brawls later
to
a tune
to
that same tattoo
striped
across her clit
--
she was so spunky
I
fell in love with her
unstraight
away --
she
was so spunky
I
wanted to become
a
lesbian prostitute
The
erotic arises out of something crazy,
something internal, something sensual,
something cooking, something flourishing,
something deathly. Michael Harlow:
When
she
Closes
my hand into the fist it was,
Running
the tip of my tongue
Along
the inside of my wrist,
I
begin to imagine where it is
We
may be arriving, one heart-
Stopping
prediction from now.
Necromantic
Interlude
Religion,
the earth, death, beasts, the mythological.
. . these are the areas that poets
refer to when describing erotic experiences.
it is necessary for them to reach
into those undefined places where
story, the senses and memory provoke
and evoke the strongest desire of
all -- to live so intensely that we
obey the erotic drive even to the
point of abnegation:
I
see two beasts
meeting
at night
one
with your arms.
She
burns for him all day,
but
in the black trees
her
tongue is cool.
Their
drink their pool of one another,
until her wings are fluttering against
him.
His
hooves leave the ground then,
flashing
past her
into
the night.
I
See Two Beasts (Mary
Anne Bourke)
Performance
poet Neena light-heartedly worships
'at the altar of oral sex':
.
. . speaking in tongues
listening
as you spoke of weaving
fingers
through the velvet of my underground.
But
all pleasure is stripped from sex
in Anne Donovan's poem about a sex
worker:
On
the game hunting strange meat
burntout
faces of the street
Take
her home
Take
her home where the money lies winking
with
durex and paper towels on the bed
Unhooking
with the Other
If
sex and work don't mix, eroticism
and sport are inseparable. Michael
O'Leary's recipe of comic chaos knows
this well:
The
sickly inswinger
By
glimmering through the low-browed
misty defences
Furled
round with thy spittle and ropey
slime
The
ball a supermammary horror
And
serves only to make my night more
irksome.
.
. . the dripping carcass of Hadlee
impaled on the wickets of my brain
which stand the top of Gothic Calgary
-- he lusts after the Bleeding Nun
who dances seductively around his
writhing body. . . He closes
his eyes, trying to shut out the
beautiful visage, but she moves
closer, her perfume filling his
head and all his sense maddened
by her touch, his agony and ecstasy
complete as he becomes the more
ensnared in this trap, this spider
web of human passion, she the black
widow smiling all the while. . .
Out
Of It
Even
in Dunedin, where the puritanical
cult of Calvinism found its Southern
Hemispheric home, Eros is alive and
well, albeit in a rather self-analytical
way:
By
worshipping in the temple of the
body
during
love-making,
all
desires are fulfilled
Here
in this body are the sacred rivers;
here
are the sun and the moon,
as
well as all the pilgrimage places,
I
have not encountered another temple
as
blissful
as my own body.
Brother
Set (from
Alien Child 3)
Wellington
poet Raoul Sensual is influenced by
the erotic sculptures and tantric
practices of India, so it is not surprising
that in New Zealand he is aware of
the opposition of guilt-based Puritanism
and eastern sexual openness. In this
one an American couple visit a Hindu
temple:
The
amorous celestial
was
taking a woman from behind.
The
stone woman's breasts were more
sensual
than
my wife's, the American thought,
.
. . She was conscious of a little
golden cross
that
hung
between
her breasts and it was stained
by
sweat.
The
Amorous Celestial
Sometimes
he is more direct, and becomes merely
funny:
.
. . before you know it she's on
top
her
unbelievably large breasts pummelling
your face
Succubus
a Violent Sex Demon
But
this brings us to the sadder side
of eroticism, the masochistic and
the sadistic. Kim Eggleston:
Five
days of booze and dope
and
all I wanted
was
to lay down with him
Feel
the beating heart
Instead
I'm lying here on the bed
with
a black eye, spinning
Binge
Sex
and murder have been catalogued by
the terribly under-rated Alan Brunton:
In
Tulsa
the
cops entreated him to stop
A
single shot rang out with the full
authority of the State
--
'He dropped like a stone'
They
found the Beautiful Lady in bus
stations
in
seven non-contiguous states.
Slow
Passes
The
sex murderer is also found in this
suffrage centennial-year poem by Linda
Earle where the murder is play-acted
or fantasised (at least I think that
is the case):
So
he took her even though the moon
fell
like a brick shithouse
And
her eyes rolled back till the whites
showed
as clear as day
He
took her even though he was
adonis
and her distended belly
carvd
holes out of the Dark Ages
He
took her with her broken teeth
Lining
specimen boxes like signposts
to
the ancient
He
took her and went down on her
and
put parts of her in small plastic
bags
He
was careful to name each dry bone
When
the job was complete she rolled
over
tossed
the condom on the couch
lit
up her telly and Winfield Red.
Satisfied.
So
it wasn't as bad as a real murder
(or was it happening on the telly?),
and perhaps the erotic gives us an
outlet for our terror as well as for
our love. Caroline Avery captures
the way Eros seems able to carry out
the impossible:
I
moved the South Pole north for you.
Antipodean
erotic poetry could also be moved
north for the readers of the world:
.
. . if there's a magic in my wish,
I would turn you into a mountain
and never let you out of sight,
make
words chase upon your heels like
spinning tops. I would wake you
with a thought.
.
. . the lamp lowered like a white
breast
and
that is the moon, anytime. Light,
submerged
in
tears descended to the corners of
his eyes.
Variations (Stephen Oliver).
Some
Refs: The Tears of Eros Georges
Battaille, Songs of the Happy Isles
Maud Peacock, Songs Unsung Johannes
Anderson, Collected Poems James
K. Baxter, Islands 25 and 35, Poetry
NZ 1990 Number 2, Scene Away from the
Crime Jane Bowron, Giotto's Elephant
Michael Harlow, Writings 10
(Mary Anne Bourke), From the Face to
the Bin Kim Eggleston, Slow Passes
Alan Brunton, Sevensome—new poems
by NZ women (Linda Earle), Guardians
Not Angels Stephen Oliver.
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