pantoum's Diaryland Diary ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- AN OBSCENE FOUND POEM ... EVENTUALLY Taking us by and large, we're a queer lot Here's a figure I came across last night: 50,000 Americans died of AIDS before Ronald Reagan even mentioned the word. Ponder that. I selected my MFA program largely because it emphasized writing about AIDS but also because it was in DC, where direct action about the epidemic was forcing conversation on an almost daily basis (well, and also because Marilyn Hacker and Minnie Bruce Pratt were visiting writers there). Other writers such as Jean Valentine and Thom Gunn and Richard McCann and Paul Monette were also either on faculty there or were visiting writers who shared their explorations of the impact of this disease in readings and seminars and workshops that sometimes left me unable to move for whole minutes after the event was over. I still remember Paul Monette's acute anger and pain ... and he's been gone so many years now. I considered other MFA programs but eliminated most of them in a few easy steps. First, any program that didn't list a single woman on its faculty went into my discard pile (and you'd be surprised how many that eliminated). Famous programs such as Iowa's, the ones that produce writers easily identifiable by their particular program—hard-working, professional (and often quite gifted) writers who slide along the writing circuit selling their personalities and credentials and carefully recorded, descriptive scenes like so many literary baseball cards and whose descriptions often shout MFA-workshopese to other writers ("the tiles were a kind of incandescent blue, luminous and mysterious as a cool night sky in February") also went into my discard pile. I had only studied writing at an undergraduate level when I was making my selections, but was determined to keep my own stubborn voice even if I'm the only one who likes it ... and had read enough to recognize that famous programs can co-opt creativity/individuality in their zeal to churn out students who will wax poetic about every color of every tile in every room and the way the sunlight reflects on each of these colorful tiles just as their instructors instruct them to do, whether or not these details add one iota of meaning to a piece. So here's my deal: I am a poet and I am just not very interested in those peripherals. I want mileage out of every element, every damn syllable of every single line of my poems, but, if the color of an element in the room doesn't further my meaning, well then I consider the information extraneous, distancing, and tediously boring (which maybe that's why I'm still working on my novel after all these years!). It's important to me that every detail serve at least a dual purpose, that it's not just there because some writing workshop instructor who published enough to get a teaching gig said good writers include such details. (Fiction writers? Probably. Poets? Tell me why.) It didn't take me long to narrow my grad-school search down to just one program'and that program only accepted five poets a year. So I got busy memorizing obscure terms for the specialized GREs (stichomythia: a series of brief one-line exchanges between characters in a Greek play), took the GREs (Who wrote this random paragraph in a long series of random paragraphs that do not mention a single character or location? Well the writer certainly likes adjectives and that's one long sentence; could it be Faulkner?), then ponied up the money and applied. I understood my odds though and so accepted a job at an ecology lab on bomb plant grounds and commenced to pulling radioactive alligators onto airboats and tagging them. Then, miraculously, I was accepted into the program and suddenly found myself swimming in AIDS and art and LGB activism (this was before trans enlightenment) and swimming in words and poverty and heady writing assignments and big-city lesbian culture. People who describe the summer of '67 as the summer of love would no doubt describe the summer of '89 as the summer of homohate. That's when Congress threatened to cut the NEA's $170,000,000 budget if it didn't cease funding so-called obscene art, the era when Serrano's Piss Christ pissed off so many so-called Christians who failed to recognize that a crucifix in a jar of piss can be and is aesthetically appealing ... and it can also make a powerful statement about the fact that our culture doesn't respect Christ's message worth a piss. Like Milton and his interpretation of the rainbow (which consists of only three colors) though, the knee-jerk variety of fundamentalist Christian views the world through a lens that filters out subtlety and reduces everything to simple blacks and whites. This is also the era when Jesse Helms pulled Mapplethorpe photos out of his pocket to demonstrate his definition of obscene, the era when Congress enacted the so-called decency clause that forced NEA grantees to sign a pledge stating that their work did not contain homoerotic content or obscene subject matter. Then the NEA used this clause to revoke the grants of four artists—Tim Miller, John Fleck, Holly Hughes, and Karen Finley—who were, I believe, all gay ... or at least their works all dealt with sexual and queer themes. (ASIDE: most people don't seem to know this but these four artists successfully sued the NEA over the so-called decency clause and won the case. The Clinton Administration, however, appealed this decision and moved the case to the Supreme Court, where the NEA prevailed.) When the NEA held hearings at the Old Post Office that summer, Tim Miller stood in the courtyard naked and wrapped himself in yellow caution tape as the tourists sipped their slurpies and gaped. Guerrilla Girls protested and swallowed fire. And my direct action group OUT! staged an art-in by donning suits and carrying concealed accordioned signs and various pieces of artwork into a session that the voting public was allowed to observe, but in which we must not participate. We decided beforehand to hold our art-in only if the NEA committee tabled its discussion of homoerotic art, and they did. We were scattered about the room and so, on signal, stood up and proceeded to share homoerotic art with an auditorium of captive audience members. I held up a Minnie Bruce Pratt poem and read it to the room. Others read homoerotic excerpts or held up posters of Mapplethorpe images or other homoerotic art . . . and the NEA committee was too stunned to react. I swear, their mouths were practically agape. We expected to be pulled from our chairs and dragged out of the room, but no one even got up to call the cops and the fifteen or so of us in the room finished our art-in before a security guard escorted us, without arrest, out of the building. (This is also the era when the Corcoran pulled the Mapplethorpe exhibit and, when Cincinnati's Contemporary Art Center decided to proceed with its show, the Art Center and its director were charged with pandering, illegal use of images of nude children, and obscenity charges—a first in the American art world.) Anyway. About that obscene found poem I promised at the beginning of this piece: I working with Priests for Equality as all this was occurring (in addition to being a full-time graduate student) and had my head buried in editorial work on an inclusive, nonhierarchical new testament and lectionaries and responsorial psalms. This means that, when I first saw Mapplethorpe's Helmut and Brooks—the infamous arm-fucking photo—I was reading the book of Psalms, and, well, it didn't take long for me to discover that this extended love poem is filled with references to arms. I was pissed that Jesse Helms was attempting to define what is and is not obscene and have always been a smart ass, and so decided to write an obscene poem comprised entirely of words from the Bible. Here it is. PSALMS: A FOUND POEM (© 1990, but I am telling you where it's published because then I'm no longer anonymous!) 11:18 a.m. - 2005-03-16 ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- |
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