This next piece pays
homage to the first part of the phraise 'make love, not war'.
And I took some liberties with the definition of love. In
general these would be poems that are mainly about sex. Or
sexual foibles.
I enjoyed reading sexually themed work to a large crowd.
There was the titilation, the giggles, the gasps of "did he
really say that?"
Yes, I did. Poetry is not safe. Poetry is not
dull. And if you come away from a reading without any image,
any reaction or sense of meaning, then you just went to a horrible
poetry reading.
I would rather have someone be revulsed by my work than have no
reaction at all. If there is a reaction, then the poets work
is done, excepting, of course, writing another damn poem.
Anyway, I liked to shock, and still do. It brings people
either into confrontation with their values or into harmony with them.
This is not necessarily a bad thing, as many American's
could stand to think about their values and exactly why they have those
values in the first place. So much inculcation goes on, upon
so many different levels, and people seem blind to it. The
artists job is also to hold a mirror up to life, and as the audience
recoils or embraces the images they find there, it is the artists
responsibility to ask "why?", and in that process, maybe the audience
will ask "why?", too.
But, then again, people take away from an artists work whatever they're
going to want to take away from it. Many great themes might
exist, but someone may take the most innocuous or irrelevant, as is
their choice. Usually its what they feel the most safe in
embracing. The least controversial.
Plus, audiences do love a well written sex-poem.
So I wrote "One Way Street", which is a poem about, if nothing else,
oral sex (or a lack thereof) anddisco bush.
I still remember that night. That final night, as
well as the read. There's a line in there about thatch and
peasants that didn't hit the audience well.
But I liked it, even though this was a bit more for entertainment to
releive the tension created by some of the other work I read.
And, yeah, that line doesn't read well. But I liked
it, so it stays. Anyway, here it is: One Way
Street. (Click on the flash to activate it, and click on the
play button again to make it play.)
