{"id":14896,"date":"2012-01-19T06:34:12","date_gmt":"2012-01-19T14:34:12","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=14896"},"modified":"2012-01-19T06:34:12","modified_gmt":"2012-01-19T14:34:12","slug":"fragments-of-evolving-manhood-the-cunt-poem-challenge","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=14896","title":{"rendered":"Fragments of Evolving Manhood: The “Cunt Poem” Challenge"},"content":{"rendered":"

Trigger warning for a brief mention of sexual violence.<\/em><\/p>\n

I have not posted a Fragments of Evolving Manhood<\/a> piece on a long while, mostly because my attention has been focused elsewhere<\/a>, but I have been working these past couple of weeks on an essay that is pretty important to me and since it fits in the “Fragments” series, I thought I’d share some of it. I’d love to be able to call the essay “The ‘Cunt Poem’ Challenge,” and I will probably send it out with that title, but I am betting not a few editors will have a hard time with it. In any event, here is the excerpt. Please be aware as you read that the first paragraph is the introduction, which I think you need for context, while the second and third paragraphs are from later on in the essay.<\/p>\n

The leader of my first graduate poetry workshop\u2014this was 1985\u2014was telling us about a challenge she\u2019d issued to the men in the group of poets she hung out with when she was younger. \u201cNone of you,\u201d she said she told them, \u201cwill ever write a successful \u2018cunt poem,\u2019 because, when it comes to cunts, men only understand clich\u00e9s.\u201d We all laughed, the three of us who were men perhaps a little uncomfortably, and then she informed us that a poem her challenge had inspired was in the anthology she\u2019d assigned as our text. I read that poem four times when I got home that night, finding it harder to believe with each reading that anyone could have thought it deserved publication. Not only did it rely on precisely the kinds of clich\u00e9s I understood my teacher to have been talking about, ending, for example, by calling women\u2019s genitals, without irony, \u201cthe gates of paradise;\u201d but the entire poem was built on the biggest clich\u00e9 of all, treating The Vagina<\/em> it discussed\u2014because I still cannot help but think of the word as capitalized and in italics, even though it never appears in the poem\u2014as nothing more than an object of the poet\u2019s contemplation, like the Grecian urn had been for Keats, as if all the vaginas The Vagina<\/em> represented were not in reality attached to the living, breathing bodies of actual women.<\/p>\n

\/\/\/<\/p>\n

The first thing I did was trash every poem I\u2019d written to that point. Then, once I\u2019d let go of the baggage all that old work represented, the poems that became my first book, The Silence of Men<\/a> <\/em>(CavanKerry Press 2006), began to take shape. At last, I felt like I\u2019d found a language in which I could speak about my body as my own, in which my desires and my fears, my vulnerabilities and regrets, my joys and my failures, were mine and no one else\u2019s to give meaning to. Committing to that language meant committing to a radical honesty about who I was, both as a survivor of child sexual abuse and as a man; it meant rejecting utterly the rhetoric of invisibility with which the man who forced his penis into my mouth had so effectively and for so many years hijacked what I had to say.<\/p>\n

That kind of honesty is precisely what is lacking in the clich\u00e9s my teacher defined as the limits of the male imagination when it comes to writing about women\u2019s genitals. Take, for example, the clich\u00e9 that ends the \u201ccunt poem\u201d I spoke about at the beginning of this essay, \u201cthe gates of paradise.\u201d The dishonesty in this metaphor lies primarily in the way it objectifies women\u2019s bodies, describing not women\u2019s experience of being embodied, and not even men\u2019s experience of women\u2019s bodies as bodies inhabited by women, but rather the particular experience men have of our own bodies when we have sex with women. It praises women\u2019s genitals, in other words, not for being what they are, but for how men can use them, and so, on a cultural level, renders women as invisible and voiceless as I was rendered by the men who used me. To meet my teacher\u2019s challenge, then, to be a male poet who writes a successful \u201ccunt poem,\u201d is not simply to find a non-clich\u00e9 way of calling women\u2019s genitals \u201cthe gates of paradise.\u201d Rather, it is to discover language that will make visible the women whose genitals they are, unwrapping from within a male perspective the layers of misconception and misrepresentation in which they are bound by the sexual objectification of women that is so central to our culture. It is, in other words, a profoundly political endeavor, one that requires a man not only to refuse complicity in the inherent violation that sexually objectifying women is, but also to articulate a way of being a man who sees women as sexual beings that does justice to who they are as human beings.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Cross-posted on It’s All Connected<\/a><\/em>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Trigger warning for a brief mention of sexual violence. I have not posted a Fragments of Evolving Manhood piece on a long while, mostly because my attention has been focused elsewhere, but I have been working these past couple of … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":49,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[34,55,96,134,136],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-14896","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-gender-and-the-body","category-men-and-masculinity","category-rape-intimate-violence-related-issues","category-sex","category-writing"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14896","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/49"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=14896"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14896\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":14898,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/14896\/revisions\/14898"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=14896"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=14896"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=14896"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}