Print

Print

This is excellent. Those ladies were enjoying poetry as they would a good novel or film that had a sex scene.  It seems to me, that we're still hung up about sex and sensuality.   It was Freud who said that sex is one of life's struggles and that when it comes down to basics,  '...all human behaviour is motivated by the drives or instincts, which in turn are the neurological representations of physical needs.'  He referred to them as the 'life instincts., which  '...perpetuate (a) the life of the individual, by motivating him or her to seek food and water, and (b) the life of the species, by motivating him or her to have sex.'   So, what's wrong with it - in poetry?  It's in every other genre.   To quote a few lines from one of my poems,

quantities of the necessary
such beauty in our needs
and I'm in the mood to straighten out
pepper and salt a sexual boy

I can recommend two good reads - Perfect Skin and ZigZag Street, adult novels by Nick Earls, you'll have a good laugh and get back in touch with yourself!

HH

>From: [log in to unmask]
>Reply-To: "Poetryetc provides a venue for a dialogue relating to poetry and poetics, r" <[log in to unmask]>
>To: [log in to unmask]
>Subject: Hope in Katoomba
>Date: Fri, 1 Dec 2000 01:19:43 +0000
>
>Helen wrote (quoting A.D. Hope's Australia:
>
>They call her a young country, but they lie:
>She is the last of lands, the emptiest,
>A woman beyond her change of life, a breast
>Still tender but within the womb is dry.
>
>Jim writes:
>
>I always associated this with Lilith. Australia as representation of the first Eve. I haven't done much with it but I'm thinking of examining the representation of Lilith in both Hope and Wright's poetry. It may be eisegesis but Lilith is there in every poem about Eve, Australia represented as woman... I dunno, maybe I'm seeing things.
>
>I was in Katoomba in September and at one of the lookouts took refuge from the rain at a coffee shop. Incidentally I was thumbing through the latest collection of essays about Hope "The Double Looking Glass" and found that two elderly women were seated at the table next to mine reading each other poems from the collected Hope.
>
>They had finished their capucinos and started on Teaser Rams laughing and ocassionally sighing "oooooohhh" at the juicy bits and then moved on to Advice to Young Women. I couldn't help but watch at their reactions and listen to the way they compared him to Coleridge. And the way one of the ladies, much to the delight of the other would leaf through to the more "sensualist" of the works.
>
>I wanted to lean across and tell them how Hope was published in Playboy but refrained.
>
>Cheers,
>
>Jim
>This message was sent through MyMail http://www.mymail.com.au

Get more from the Web. FREE MSN Explorer download : http://explorer.msn.com