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 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.

The leader of my first grad­u­ate poetry work­shop — this was 1985 — was telling us about a chal­lenge she’d issued to the men in the group of poets she hung out with when she was younger. “None of you,” she said she told them, “will ever write a suc­cess­ful ‘cunt poem,’ because, when it comes to cunts, men only under­stand clichés.” 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’d 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 clichés I under­stood my teacher to have been talk­ing about, end­ing, for exam­ple, by call­ing women’s gen­i­tals, with­out irony, “the gates of par­adise;” but the entire poem was built on the biggest cliché of all, treat­ing The Vagina it dis­cussed — because I still can­not help but think of the word as cap­i­tal­ized and in ital­ics, even though it never appears in the poem — as noth­ing more than an object of the poet’s con­tem­pla­tion, like the Gre­cian urn had been for Keats, as if all the vagi­nas The Vagina rep­re­sented were not in real­ity attached to the liv­ing, breath­ing bod­ies of actual women.

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The first thing I did was trash every poem I’d writ­ten to that point. Then, once I’d let go of the bag­gage all that old work rep­re­sented, the poems that became my first book, The Silence of Men (CavanKerry Press 2006), began to take shape. At last, I felt like I’d 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’s 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.

That kind of hon­esty is pre­cisely what is lack­ing in the clichés my teacher defined as the lim­its of the male imag­i­na­tion when it comes to writ­ing about women’s gen­i­tals. Take, for exam­ple, the cliché that ends the “cunt poem” I spoke about at the begin­ning of this essay, “the gates of par­adise.” The dis­hon­esty in this metaphor lies pri­mar­ily in the way it objec­ti­fies women’s bod­ies, describ­ing not women’s expe­ri­ence of being embod­ied, and not even men’s expe­ri­ence of women’s 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’s 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’s chal­lenge, then, to be a male poet who writes a suc­cess­ful “cunt poem,” is not sim­ply to find a non-cliché way of call­ing women’s gen­i­tals “the gates of par­adise.” 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.