In the 1960’s, when I was a sixteen year old Toronto virgin, the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation ran a fifteen minute television show about poetry on Sunday afternoons. I was very interested in poetry and I was passingly familiar in an adolescent kind of way, with Eliot, Joyce, Dadaism, Surrealism, and concrete poetry. So I didn’t want to write anything lyrical or nice; love poems were not on the agenda. I wanted to write ‘radical’ stuff that offended or confused people, or better, by some stroke of genius, stuff that discovered a new understanding of what poetry was.
Nonetheless, I suspect that my ambitions held more than just adding the next step in Modernism’s heroic great march forward towards the shining goal of form united with function. Please never let it be said that the evolution of Modernism is not a worthy goal, but I suspect that my young virginal self had more complicated, less thoroughly intellectual ambitions in mind as well.
So I found that poetry television show on the CBC gripping – the poets I was reading in the Canadian literary magazines available in my high school library were there to be seen and heard. Among others, I saw Miriam Waddington, Irving Layton, Earl Birney, Louis Dudek, Raymond Souster, John Robert Columbo, Joe Rosenblatt, Dennis Lee, bp nichol, Margaret Atwood and Milton Acorn. But most importantly, I saw Gwendolyn MacEwen made up like Nefertiti gallivanting and posing in a silly black and white film. Naturally enough, I fell in love with her. I was intoxicated with the hope for ideas that could be shared in the flesh.
Years later I was reading Susan Sontag and during Against Interpretation I fell in love with her too. But this time I wasn’t guided by adolescent heat and eye liner. Sontag was just lovely thinking, although I’ll admit it helped that she was female. As time went by, I also deepened my friendships with Emerson and Nietzsche; we had such wonderful times just hanging out together. And more recently, I’ll confess that I also had a bit of a thing for Anne Carson when I read Autobiography of Red.
These things have lead me to believe there is an erotic component to reading, and as a reader, I might be looking for fathers, mothers, friends and lovers. Carl Jung was my dad, Hannah Höch was my mom, Gertrude Stein was my sister, and Arthur Schopenhauer was my brother. As Duchamp said, Eros, c’est la vie (Rrose Sélavy).
Besides reading, I don’t doubt there’s an erotic component to writing as well: At this very moment, without any protection at all, I’m putting ideas in the minds of complete strangers. Sometimes that gives me a tingle, and with pleasant embarrassment, I apologize for my impertinence.
What an intimate exposure.......I don't think I could have read this without clothes on.
Also- I remember this painting of yours.(I believe it's yours.) That little sphere, as I stare, is not static.....It is either moving towards me or receding. Intriguing piece.
The mind and body does not lie.