Comments on: ¡Maldición!

By: Lavinia Greenlaw

Lavinia Greenlaw — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 21:47:05 +0000

Thank you for this, Javier; it has had me thinking for days.
Transgression has accumulated so many conventions that when explicit, it is more like dance steps or special effects. It is the thing we must imagine that shocks and disturbs, and that’s why poetry can still do it: not in the words it uses but how. We think we can, and will, write about anything but we are, most of us, constrained by a desire for elegance and dignity – much more so than we believe. When did you last read a poem that not only impressed and/or moved you, but disturbed you too?
I agree about the importance of everyday rhythms, not the what but the how: ‘twenty-nine days and a muthafuckin wake-up’. Your experiment reminded me of trying to get students to trust their ear when learning to scan a poem. You could ask them where they would insert the ‘muthafuckin’ and I bet most would put it in the right place.
Sometimes the trangressive utterance is simple exorbitance, but that too works best when it has music. The British board of censors once looked over a script in which a woman shouted at a man: ‘Pig! Pig! Pig! Pig! Pig!’ Their instruction to the writer was ‘Delete three pigs.’
You can hear exactly why it had to five, why four would have been too few and six too many.
Pig, pig. Doesn’t really do it for me.

By: David Shapiro

David Shapiro — Wed, 01 Oct 2008 00:44:33 +0000

My mother a Reichian and communist used to say to me that “bad words” were “love words,” and
so I grew up learning about the body from Joyce’s soliloquy and Penelope’s and Tenderness.
Onew day Allen Ginsberg took us out to lunch, or we took him out. I was sixteen or so and
my mother was entranced. She asked him about opoverty in India, since he had just been
there. He said, Mrs Shapiro, they’re still fucking in the dust. I waited to see my mother
flinch. She did not. When we left I said: Well, you didn’t seem to mind HIS use of “bad words.”
She said, still in a trance, it’;s different when he uses them.
Kenneth Koch in class once said of the word fuck with his sweet stutter:
It’s very hard to use wordfs that may emnbarass you, like fffuck. Allen
Ginsberg can use fffuck, but I haven’t really. He later wrote a beautiful poem
to orgasms. I have a sentence: And the centuyry I live in turns out to be the century
of infibgulation and fuck.
OSay if a painter rather than painting the word The painted the word Fuck.
I found some people liked a poem of mine inspired by a Picasso nude. I put in
phrases like cunt and spine or sucked. I was told it was my best poem by Timothy Lieu.
But I purposely decided to reprint it when it wouldn’t seem as if I were a painter
suddenly painting the word Fuck. Also, I noticed like anyone else that the words
–despite them being pretty and sensual and, at least for me, pointedf(haha)
didn’;t really make it up to Picasso’s painting–Sleeping Woman in l932 wherte he has almost nothing
but a few charcoal lines on a white or unpainted canvas. I don’t mind saying
that I learned most of the facts of love from the Penelope soliloquy, and so I
‘have to bend my knees to the words that are around us. Phillip Lopate
and Kenneth Koch both felt thayt Rudy Burckhardt had too many nudes imn his work.
Kenneth said his own analyst had told him to get rid of “gratutitous oranges.,”
I have written a poem only of oranges. But to go back, is it really better
to know that the Polish ruudder in Frank’s hands was Larry Rivers’s penis. I think
if Frank had wanted to he could. In some places like the end of Biotherm
certain words turn wild =as if Turner were in the snow.
Maybe if we all treated every word as if it were an epithet (Mayakopvsky) we
would be fine. And if you look at Jakobson he’s very interested in what goes first, what goes second
in morphology. So I love all those discvriminations of mothgerfucka even more than
in the sailor. All this was investigated by Proust and others and it was a study of
Pushkin, thgat great pornographer, that also led to J’s great studies of folklore,
and why tic is less dark than toc, why we don’;t say tic tock,m tock tic, why I like Ike
is so moving but Bush Mother doesn’t do it like Johns’s title Bush Baby which is not about
the President but is a nocturnal anaimal.
Bad words are nocturnal animals. Bad words is such a good word because its
primary antithetical and like an animalist fuck in the good pages, I mean the good pages,
Or what is called The good parts. If a poet isn’;tr very attuned to the weight of a big word like
‘fuck or screw, he shoulkd abandon language, Presidents have.
To sum up, there are no bad words, but thinking makes them so.
My student writes” Words are such toys.”
Between bad words and good words, oral and aural, we live and die.
Excuse th typos. A typoo is like a bad word in scholarly company, Forgive!

By: Javier Huerta

Javier Huerta — Tue, 30 Sep 2008 03:46:50 +0000

Joseph:
Thanks for commenting. I wanted to include the Navy ship as an example of a space in which the purpose of bad words isn’t to transgress. In that space, bad words form an essential part of everyday language. I’m interested in the rhythm of bad words more than their shock value. I’ve always enjoyed the fact that linguists use examples like the following to discuss the possible rhythms of language: “tennefuckingssee.” If you insert the “fucking” anywhere else it doesn’t work. “Tefuckingnnessee” is not nearly as musical. That’s why I enjoy the construction of the sailor’s countdown.
“twenty-nine days and a muthafuckin wake-up”
not: “twenty-muthafuckin-nine days and a wake-up”
not: “twenty-nine muthafuckin days and a wake-up”
not: “twenty-nine days muthafuckin and a wake-up”
not: “twenty-nine days and muthafuckin a wake-up”
not: “twenty-nine days and a wake-muthafuckin-up”
The trochaic rhythm sounds most appealing in the first example. The sailor knows this. The musicality of bad words is such an important aspect of everyday rhythm, and I just don’t think we (as poets) have explored that nearly enough.

By: Joseph Hutchison

Joseph Hutchison — Sun, 28 Sep 2008 02:39:04 +0000

Is “maldición” possible without transgression? Is transgression possible anymore? Paz made an aesthetic based on transgression, it seems to me. Certainly Celine. Later Ginsberg. Today Linh Dinh, maybe. But I wonder: is transgression possible anymore? I don’t mean the adoption of contrarian positions. I mean real transgression—the gut level sense of violation that used to be possible. I read once that a reviewer of Aaron Copland’s “Organ Symphony” wrote that “a man who could write this music could as easily commit murder.” This seems idiotic now, but at the time must have registered a recognizable sense of transgression. Is such a reaction even possible today? “Piss Christ”? Maybe. But poetry? No no no no. Poetry can not transgress anymore. All the borders are open. All the taboos are gone. So what does Javier mean when he talks about soap and Catullus? Is he living in the past? Is he indulging in a bygone era’s story? Without transgression, what do we have? A flailing. A failing. A fudging. An irrelevance?