This following is an except from Angel Exhaust Issue 13 (Spring 1996) ed.
Andrew Duncan, which was, I believe, formerly available on the Web, but
seems lately to have disappeared into the cyber other-world. I've just been
discussing it with a friend (female) and thought it might be worth putting
into focus on these lists, as it certainly asks, and maybe begs, some
questions.

So these be AD's words not mine (please!) :

david b



"Footnote on the presence of the body in art


once you start out saying that 'poetic rhythm is somatic', you can't avoid a
slide to 'put a wiggle in your walk'. The concept 'looking at a woman's
body' is too highly loaded in our society to be brought into poetry without
a major re-definition. If the poem is a presentation of the body, then it is
a by-form of narcissistic display; being a female poet is like being an
actress or a nightclub singer. This puts power into the hand of the reader:
if he dislikes the poem, the poet is unattractive, and the question of
intellectual debate or bad reading falls out. When the poet reaches 40, or
45, a poetic crisis follows, because the body, which is now the 'signified'
of the poem, is altering in its social status; as film actresses' salaries
crash when they reach 45, according to Delphine Seyrig. I do not think this
mere punctiliousness; the careers of two of the most brilliant British poets
of the past 50 years, Rosemary Tonks and Lynette Roberts, were ended by
religious conversions, and I suspect this catastrophe was was conditioned
partly by the pressure placed on girls and women to be charming and
alluring, etc., partly by the pressure placed on women to be mute and meek,
which prevented them from emerging as religious poets, allowed to wield
moral authority.This whole chain of identifications, equivocations, needs to
be torn link from link; the idea of the body in art needs to be intensely
analysed so that we can develop a theory of display, adornment, admiring and
being attracted which is far more complicated and more abstract. The hot
spectrum between narcissism and shame accounts for a disproportionate share
of failure in poetry.
(and finally)
A firm separation of mind and body ends up with either pornography or
christianity. It would be acceptable to state that works of art are
sometimes projections of self, provided this is taken to mean a
mental-physical whole."



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