Friday 3 September 2010

On What Men Do at Literary Events.

I posted this on what seems to be a redundant blog, a while ago.
"The Sisterhood of the Pointy Heel (incorporating also the Knights of the Besmirched Countenance)", seems to be defunct. It was a blog which made fun of the battle of the sexes.  I kinda..... infiltrated....


But. 


I love this pome. It's a deliciously naughty counterblast to the po-faced drones who take literary events too seriously.

At the Poetry Reading,   by John Brehm

I can’t keep my eyes off the poet’s wife’s legs—
they’re so much more
beautiful than anything he might
be saying, though I’m no longer
in a position really to judge,
having stopped listening some time ago.
He’s from the Iowa Writers Workshop
and can therefore get along fine
without my attention. He started in
reading poems about his childhood—
barns, cornsnakes, gradeschool, flowers,
that sort of stuff—the loss of
innocence he keeps talking about
between poems, which I can relate to,
especially under these circumstances.
Now he’s on to science, a poem
about hydrogen, I think, he’s trying
to imagine himself turning into hydrogen.
Maybe he’ll succeed. I’m imagining
myself sliding up his wife’s fluid,
rhythmic, lusciously curved, black-
stockinged legs, imagining them arched
around my shoulders, wrapped around my back.
My God, why doesn’t he write poems about her!
He will, no doubt, once she leaves him,
leaves him for another poet, perhaps,
the observant, uninnocent one, who knows
a poem when it sits down in a room with him.

17 comments:

  1. Love it, love it! I wish I had written it ;) !
    xxx

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  2. Great poem.
    One of the best magazine articles I ever read had to do with lambasting men who think they are zen. :)

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  3. oooo! glad you noticed .... and therein lies all the fun ;)!!!
    xxx

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  4. Rita: Now you've confused me. Basting of lambs? Well of course, no other way to get that crispiness, that crunch to the outside.
    Zen?
    I am zen.
    Of course. Less the rock in a sea of combed sand, no, not the tidy, quiet, contemplative zen.
    I am more the "Explosion in a Garbage Can" sort of zen.

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  5. RDG: Of course I've noticed.I've made a careful study, even. Definitely a girl! If you had written that poem I'd be getting jealous. Very.

    Now me? I couldn't write that poem. I'd be stuck at trying to make that scenario out of play-doh.

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  6. My eyeballs are only for you, babe! But I'll buy us some play-doh for the fun together times!!xxxx

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  7. I love this poem. Friends have told me that a man will rarely spend time looking at a women without thinking about what it's like to have sex with her.
    As a manager, I find this entertaining in the work place, especially knowing how a man can so easily be distracted by crossing and uncrossing legs. It is a wonder men found time to pioneer.

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  8. RDG:If we are together, i'll have no time for play-doh!

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  9. Curiously: I can't speak for all men, of course, but I can tell you it's a story we put about to unsettle you.
    Actually we might be thinking about whether to get new tyres on the car, but we'll gaze at you whilst we think that, just as you might gaze at a vase of flowers whilst musing on buying a new pair of shoes.

    As for the leg crossing, phew. That's just so unfair, but that's why we bring chocolate biscuits to meetings. Because we can regain our advantage whilst the leg crosser wrestles with that perennial women's demon "I want chocolate/I mustn't want chocolate". Your faces screw up as chocolate want and chocolate fear battle.

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  10. RDG: Cheesecake? Lemon cheesecake?
    mmmmmmmmmmmmmmm.

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  11. lovely sentiment in that thar poem, it's a cruel system we have here in the US regarding that MFA pursuit. snobbery and elitism seems to be the university's route to developing creativity. there was a big fracas about it on the pottery blogs lately. i'd like to see (not meet) the Iowan's wife. i noticed curiously's comment about men being unable to look at a woman for long without thinking about having sex with her and wanted to comment on that but before i got halfway through this sentence, i realized that i could write half a book (not a poem) about this phenomenon and the fine, subtle gradations of what is actually happening there. alas too long for a comment box and for my schedule. suffice to say that it's true but not in the way it's perceived to be true. i'm afraid because of my ineptitude in describing the finer points to my spouse, that it may only be completely understood in the male's domain. of course maybe, if i were a poet, i could grasp the ephemeral wisp that would make it all easily understood and get it down on paper.

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  12. Write it Jim! I need backup!

    "because of my ineptitude in describing the finer points to my spouse"
    I suspect no man has ever yet managed to satisfactorily explain this to a spouse or significant other. I think their brains are so differently wired to ours that they are actually incapable of understanding what's going on when a man looks at a woman.

    Sometimes we are John Brehm, committing adultery in our minds, and sometimes we're wondering if we left the fridge door open....

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  13. I wanted to explain the zen thing a little further...

    Eureka! I love the internet! I typed in a few choice words & the same article I was telling you about popped up!
    http://www.realspirituality.com/pages/pdf/zen_men.pdf

    Being a guy, you might not be able to relate to zen men. But, I'm sure there is a female counterpart.

    "Explosion in a Garbage Can Zen"
    I can almost picture it. :)

    Friends have told me that a man will rarely spend time looking at a women without thinking about what it's like to have sex with her.

    My ex husband told me once, when it looked like he was doing the above, he was actually looking at her & thinking about having sex with me.

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  14. You're so right, I can't relate to the zen men in that article.

    Last night, a friend told me he'd just seen one of the blondie twins, who'd moved back into the town and had sworn to live her life henceforth without the complication of a man in it. Because, she said "I seem to attract the shittiest ones".
    The truth is not that she attracted the shitty ones, she and her sister attracted pretty much any heterosexual men, but, the nice guys stood not a chance.
    Because the girls would choose. And their choice was always the tough guy who expected them to know their place and do as they were told. Time and time again, I saw them make that choice. You could see it happening.

    And that's what happened to the writer of the article. She chose, and she got the guys she chose. I found myself with no sympathy for her, though I did laugh. Especially the bit about the knife, and her comment that she'd rather chop with a plastic knife than get into all the ritual he attached to his "zen" knife.
    Partly I laughed, because stainless steel is always going to be inferior to carbon steel as a cutting edge. No samurai ever carried a stainless steel sword. Stainless is for the lazy, who don't want to look after a real steel knife. No, you don't need to worship it, but you need to clean and dry it, oil it if it's not going to be used for a while.
    So Zen-Boy's zen-samurai guru was a watered-down fraud too.

    There is a female counterpart.
    I met her. My pal was trying to set me up with her, I was a single male, and happy to be so at the time, but friends in relationships, coupled-up always want to play Noah, its an affront to them to see an unattached person, two-by-two, they'd murmur...
    So, we were out, in a group, she joined us after my pal rang her, me all unsuspecting.... And we went back to her place afterwards, and then... the others had to go, but, hey, I should stay a while. She was a dancer. Ballet. Classical. and she had crystals. And stuff, oh pyramids and dreamcatchers...
    And while she made coffee, I got up from the chair, and started to look at her bookshelves. I'm a book person. You can learn a lot about a person from the books they read. And she came into the room, silent on dancers feet, and yelled "What are you doing! Don't you TOUCH my books!"...
    She was irate. And she went around, nudging everything into place, into alignment, until once more the great pyramid of cheops aligned with the henges, and the lines of energy crackled....
    "I think I'll go now" I said.
    She didn't reply.

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  15. Lemon cheesecake ??!!! OH YEAH! i'm there .... xxxx!

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  16. I was given that article by a friend who had finally realized she kept picking those "zen" men over & over. She was able to break herself of the habit.

    I know some pretty weird women that involve themselves in all that nebulous cosmic energy stuff. They seem pretty gullible...would probably go for the "zen" men.

    Dream Catchers!
    Those are like the lamest piece of crap ever! Once I found a dream catcher at a garage sale with a poodle face crocheted(or knitted?)right in the center of it. I bought it because it made me laugh.

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