Poets RL Goldberg and Ashley Keyser Consider, Well, Inner Resources

In the new issue of ASAP/Journal, Ashley Keyser and RL Goldberg compare poetry to masturbation in the context of quarantine: "Masturbation, like poetry, doesn’t 'do' anything. It cares little for narrative; an image can be enough for an orgasm," writes Keyser, who goes on to illuminate the subject through a selection of tweets. More from RL:

When quarantine began I was repeating, all the time, the first eight lines of Berryman’s “Dream Song 14”:

Life, friends, is boring. We must not say so.
After all, the sky flashes, the great sea yearns,
we ourselves flash and yearn,
and moreover my mother told me as a boy
(repeatingly) ‘Ever to confess you’re bored
means you have no

Inner Resources.’ I conclude now I have no
inner resources, because I am heavy bored.⁵

As you write, there is, perhaps, more to boredom than the affected irony that these tweets imply. I think what most appealed to me about this poem is the idea of inner resources; being sealed in the apartment all day, I started to wonder if I had any. And it seems like underlying these tweets — even less, I think, than our appetites being unloosed — is the sense that maybe we don’t have inner resources. Which is not at all a comment on masturbation as, in itself, joyless, or non-resourceful (quite the opposite! Anyway, I think masturbation is not quite an “inner” resource). But thinking about being-in … being inside, being in a mood, being in fear, being in love, being enclosed, being in a state of uncertainty. As I read these tweets, and kept reading them, it was hard to not read some of them as desperately seeking any kind of relation to outsideness. Whether that’s outside the apartment (yes please!), outside one’s traditional comportment (it didn’t seem like masturbation was something that many of these folks regularly tweeted about — certainly not their own habits), or just getting outside the self. Is masturbation able to get us outside of the self in a context in which casual sex is risky?

Merleau-Ponty wrote, in The Visible and the Invisible, this wonderful phenomenological exploration of the reversibility of the touched and touching; he calls this the chiasm.… 

Check out the fascinating exchange in full at ASAP/Journal.