by Naomi Darvell
(05/14/03)
I grew up reading
the sex-saturated ancient Greeks and Romans so I've always thought poetry and
masturbation were somehow akin to each other. Both are solitary, rhythmic activities
which have a definite payoff, but each seems to renew itself endlessly, too.
Both are highly erotic.
One of my favorite
ancient Roman poets, Catullus often presents his poem like an erection you can
mount and ride, if you're brave enough.
"I'll fuck you up the ass and force you to blow me!" proclaims one of his poems.
This is aggressive dick-waving, directed at his friends and critics. A poem
addressed to a girlfriend boasts that his cock is bursting through his clothes.
He also suggests his poetry is something to beat off to -- or at any rate an
aphrodisiac. (When he suggests it's good for hairy old men who can't get it up
any more, he's possibly referring to Julius Caesar or some other real-life contemporary.)
Although his poems can be phallic, Catullus doesn't write about masturbation. He's a Roman,
after all, with his eye on conquest and making inroads. For the ancient Greeks,
masturbation wasn’t an act to dwell on either. From Aristophanes to Martial,
authors joke about women using leather-covered dildoes when they have no men
around, or satirize servants masturbating after watching their master and mistress
make love. You get the feeling that masturbation is something people do strictly
from hunger and even to modern Greeks calling someone a masturbator is a strong
insult.
In honor of Masturbation Month, I went off to the library to look for poetry
that actually describes masturbating -- even celebrates it. Surely there had
to be some?
Unthrifty loveliness, why dost thou spend
Upon thy self thy beauty's legacy?
Nature's bequest gives nothing, but doth lend,
And being frank she lends to those are free.
Then, beauteous niggard why dost thou abuse,
The bounteous largess given thee to give?
Profitless usurer, why dost thou use
So great a sum of sums yet canst not live?
For having traffic with thyself alone,
Thou of thyself thy sweet self dost deceive.
Then how when nature calls thee to be gone,
What acceptable audit canst thou leave?
Thy unused beauty must be tombed with thee,
Which usèd, lives th' executor to be.
(Shakespeare, 4th Sonnet)
For Shakespeare, masturbation
was a form of cheating. The lover is holding back, keeping a separate checking
account. ("Sorry, M'lord. You're overdrawn at the sperm bank.") Shakespeare
doesn't describe jerking off as icky or gross -- rather, he implies that it's
pleasurable, but still, a frivolous and selfish act.
The first joyously
self-gratifying poet I find is Walt Whitman. From "A Song of the Rolling
Earth:"
I swear I begin to see love with sweeter spasms than that which responds
love,
It is that which contains itself, which never invites and never refuses.
From time to time -- even as he writes -- he seems to feel a sudden rush of
eroticism directed at everything -- and nothing.
Is this then a touch? quivering me to a new identity,
Flames and ether making a rush for my veins,
My flesh and blood playing out lightning to strike what is hardly different
from myself,
On all sides prurient provokers stiffening my limbs...
("Song of Myself")
Whitman sometimes
writes of sexual excitement as being almost too much to bear, but there's no
shame here.
"Divine am I
inside and out, and I make holy whatever I touch or am touch'd from."
Whitman never uses the actual word "masturbation." It's an odd word, after
all, not terribly pretty or poetic or easy to rhyme with. The ancient Romans
thought it came from manus+stuprare, "to defile with the hand," or something
similar. Even if you don't agree with that definition, the word still has a
clinical, judgmental sound. So when a poet says "masturbate," it makes a strong
statement.
Allen Ginsberg says
it often. He called himself Whitman's heir, and, like Whitman, his poems are
openly erotic and openly gay. Ginsberg’s narratives sound like detailed real-life
anecdotes. He describes his lovemaking with various people and he confesses
to masturbating. He even claims that one time masturbating brought him poetic
inspiration. After a heavy session of whacking off in his tenement apartment, the spirit
of William Blake paid him a visit in a kind of poetic initiation.
But in his poem "The
Lion For Real," Ginsberg describes masturbation as a forlorn fallback:
I went to my old boyfriend we got drunk with his girlfriend
I kissed him and announced I had a lion with a mad gleam in my eye
We wound up fighting on the floor I bit his eyebrow & he kicked me out
I ended up masturbating in his jeep parked in the street moaning 'Lion.'
Another sexually exhibitionist poet, Charles Bukowski, described a bizarre
encounter between a group of teenagers and a drunk young woman. ("The puking
lady.")
we were all virgins
but we felt very powerful then,
sitting there smoking cigarettes,
emptying cans of beer.
later we would all
go home and
masturbate,
thinking about that
woman in the park, kissing that whiskey mouth,
her legs high in the
moonlight,
the park fountain
spewing its
water
as our parents
slept in the other
bedroom, tired of it
all.
Again, masturbation
is described as a fallback measure, but Bukowski associates it with a kind of
youthful vigor.
Writing about adulthood
this time, Bukowski connects solitude, masturbation and creativity. He has almost
too many female sex partners, he claims, but, like masturbating, he writes his
poetry alone:
it's true that there
were days
then nobody\bothered me.
then i sometimes
masturbated.
those were the days
when I got my
work done.
(from "my worst rejection slip")
Other poets, and critics, too, make the connection between composing poetry
and masturbating. Of Rimbaud's "Bateau Ivre", Kenneth Rexroth wrote:
"Certainly it is possible to read... most of the erotic poems as records of
the visions and disappointments of masturbation." As I keep reading, I start
to think that maybe a lot of poems are about masturbation, without using the
actual word.
The American poet
e e cummings -- whose words form the title of this article -- attacked those who
sought to repress masturbation.
("we are told/by
is it Bishop Taylor who needs hanging/that marriage is a sure cure for masturbation")
But, according to scholar Philip Gerber, cummings feared being censored. He'd
seen copies of Ulysses being confiscated for obscenity. So cummings took
care to describe genitals, sex, and masturbation in cryptic ways.
Reading his poems,
especially his love poems, is a lot like watching sex acts. The words are poured
onto the page and the poems move along physically. When the writer of a poem
is alone, it often sounds to me like he's masturbating:
Alive
with closed eyes
to dash against darkness
in the sleeping curves of my body
Shall enter fingers of smooth mastery
with chasteness of sea-girls
Will I complete the mystery
of my flesh
I keep looking for
specific descriptions, though -- something bold and concrete, something about
the physical business of masturbating. Isn’t there a Portnoy of poetry?
With Anne Sexton,
masturbation gets poetically physical yet still seems a sad substitute for having
sex with a real partner. Her poem "The Ballad Of The Lonely Masturbator"
is luxuriant in its bitterness. She puts you directly into the mind of the masturbator:
...Finger to finger, now she's mine.
She's not too far. She's my encounter.
I beat her like a bell. I recline
in the bower where you used to mount her.
You borrowed me on the flowered spread.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
Take for instance this night, my love,
that every single couple puts together
with a joint overturning, beneath, above,
the abundant two on sponge and feather,
kneeling and pushing, head to head.
At night, alone, I marry the bed.
I break out of my body this way,
an annoying miracle. Could I
put the dream market on display?
I am spread out. I crucify.
My little plum is what you said.
At night, alone, I marry the bed...
In "The Babysitter,"
by Sharon Olds, the poet’s voice sounds positively sex-starved. ("The baby
was about six months old,/ a girl. For the length of her life, I had not/ touched
anyone..." Driven by desperation, she tries to get the baby to nurse at
her breasts. "...Suck, goddamnit, I thought,/ I wanted to feel the tug
of another/life..." Then she masturbates.
...Back in the bathroom,
no light, I lay on the floor, bared
my chest against the icy tiles,
slipped my hand between my legs and
rode, hard, against the kiln-fired floor, my
nipples holding me up off the glazed
aquamarine, as if I were flying,
upside-down, just under the ceiling of the world.
I wonder if there's
some special reason why it's a female poet who can be so frank and graphic.
Trying to explain why he was ashamed of masturbation, a male lover said, "It's
messy." Yes, if you're a man, there is the ejaculation -- usually much heavier
than a woman's -- to worry about. And, with men, getting back to Shakespeare,
there's also the consideration that you might be squandering a limited resource.
In the end, though,
it's a male poet who gives me a purely, defiantly unapologetic statement:
For Masturbation
Alan Dugan
I have allowed myself
this corner and am God.
Here in the must
beneath their stoop
I will do as I will,
either act as act,
or dream for the sake of dreams,
and if they find me out
in rocket ships or jets
working to get away,
then let my left great-toe-
nail grow into the inside knob
of my right ankle bone and let
my fingernails make eight new moons
temporarily in the cold salt marshes of my palms!
THIS IS THE WAY IT IS, and if
it is "a terrible disgrace"
it is as I must will, because I am not them
though I am theirs to kill.
While the poem is definitely about masturbation, is it, also, antiwar? Anti-technology?
I’m not sure. Certainly it's pro-individual and pro-art. Being alone, here,
represents a kind of power. Both the poem, and the act of masturbation, are
an assertion of self, of the poet's erect I.
