Grawlix in Poems? Ginsberg is howling from his grave

Warning: This blog is rated MA for Mature Audiences . It contains graphic language that we have all been exposed to since elementary school and should give absolutely no one reason to blush, but will cause some adults to believe is totally inappropriate for children, the silliness of which, in fact, is the whole point of the blog to begin with. The words in question are.... Ah, hell, you can guess what they are. And, yes, one of them contains the letter “f.” And it is used more than once.

(To be accurate, quite a few words in this blog contain the letter “f,” including the words “few” and “refer” in this paragraph, but I think we all know which particular word to which I refer.)

Editorial concerning the MA rating: Dear reader, In spite of the MA rating I would have let my eight-year-old son read this because a) he would have read it anyway, b) he knew every “bad word” because he heard his mother shout them while she was driving, c) the truly adult content was over his little head anyway, and d) preparing his brain to think like an adult isn’t a bad thing.

Recently I started contributing to an online poetry group. In one of the threads I posted the following poem:

Viewing Easy Rider

In the end
Just before Peter Fonda shot the bird at two 
Shit faced rednecks who shot back with both barrels, 
After trading cocaine for cash to traipse the country,
After sharing the crops of hippie children
Posing as the poster children for poverty,
After watching Jack Nicholson beaten to death by
Trash talking shitkickers too afraid to 
Open their eyes and see the queer in the mirror, 
After dropping too many tabs of downer brown and
Tripping through the tombstones of Mardi Gras,
Peter Fonda got it. He said, “We blew it man.”
Dennis Hopper said, “Whaddaya mean, man? We’re rich,”

You see, Peter Fonda discovered everyone 
Rolls a different road to the American dream, but
Dennis Hopper was just an asshole.

As soon as I posted I noticed a comment by another poet who’d used grawlix (!@*$_&) in one of her poems. She was concerned it might have been too much, since the profanity was implied. From there began a long stream of threads, including concern over the use of profanity in my own poem. It seems ours was a family poetry group whose children not only read the poems, but post them as well. The language in my poem, members pointed out, was inappropriate.

The group, they reminded me, was rated PG-13. To my surprise, the language in my poem merited an R (or even NC-17, the exact rating was never specified).

Were I in my twenties, attending the graduate writing workshop at Michigan State and working with my mentor Diane Wakoski (and this is probably the last real biographical detail I will reveal on this site) I know what I would say. It wouldn’t be polite, nor would it be PG-13.

But I am forty years past (okay, that was the second to last biographical detail) and my more mature self, who has perspective, understands that parents can be overly protective and Goodreads needs to maintain a censorship policy in order to ensure that parents will allow their children to let their seedling skills sprout.

At most I might suggest the group simply adopt the entire rating system to their posted poems so that parents or older siblings sit next to their under 17 children when they read the R rated poems on their monitors, iPads or iPhones.

There are, however, two of me who are forty years past. The other me is the self-anointed prophet of the poetic muse and she says poetry serves more than the desire to amuse and depict pretty images that never offend. She says sometimes poetry should slice readers’ souls from pubis to skull, rip out their psychic viscera and dangle them bloody and dripping before their third eyes with their ectoplasmic inner lids stapled to their skulls in order to make them see what shallow shits they must be if they’re afraid to expose their children to a few harsh words in verse.

If you read my last post, you'll know I’m the last person to advocate throwing profanity onto the page to see if it sticks. However, words are tools and the responsible poet uses every tool at her disposal, even if she doesn’t feel comfortable with them. The best artists experiment with different tools, different media and try to gain some level of mastery, then incorporate them into the media they know best.

I’ll be honest, even I would be loathe to post a graphic sex scene, at least without <spoiler>a spoiler alert to hide the scene</spoiler> on a Goodreads forum, nor would I advocate frequent “f” bombs hurled at the page like shit from a monkey’s diaper. (Yes, I know I mixed a metaphor, but this is a blog not an Aristotelian treatise.)

However, to toss aside any word as garbage, detritus, or inherently offensive is an act I find equally offensive. It is an act that stunts the poet’s growth and restricts his vision. It blinds on the artist and says to him “your verse can develop down this path only and wander down no side path no matter how interesting it appears.”

So let’s walk through some of those side paths to this particular question:

Protect kids? Really?

I went to elementary school in the sixties and there wasn’t a kid who wan’t intimately familiar with the words “shit,” “piss,” and even “fuck.” Sure, some of us would whisper them, or say “fuck” as “the ‘f’ word” in semi-reverent tones as though the “f” word were only one step less sacrosanct and unspeakable than “Jehovah.” But we knew the words. They were burned in our little hearts as sacred objects to be taken out, discussed reverentially and rolled off our tongues when adults weren’t around to listen. Some of us would giggle, some would blush, some would shudder with childish pre-orgasmic pleasure. Others would hide their faces in shame and confess to either their priests or in private as soon as they reached their prayer closets before joining the next available discussion.

Then there was Delbert Thrash. Delbert, whom I adapted into a much kinder character in my upcoming novel Seeing Jesus, was the rooster of our elementary school yard and he spread his seed by introducing us to every form of lewdness his child mind could entertain. How he came by it, I shudder to think, but he was the first to know every variation of every sailor’s swear word, story and sexual position. He could spot animals mating in the next yard, in the trees and down the block and he was certain to draw them to our attention. Ever heard of Dirty Ernie, the hero of innumerable lewd (and hilarious) jokes? Delbert inspired the character.

Like it or not, every school yard has a Delbert. And your children have been exposed to a Delbert unless they’ve been locked in a back yard and home schooled since diapers. Even then, chances are, they met a Delbert on a church trip. Trust me, I was raised a Baptist Preacher’s Kid, and I was one of the better behaved. (Goddam it. All right, three biographical details. But I draw the line at three.) And I still encountered my share of Delberts.

Children love to play with language, whether or not you, as their parents, like it. So don’t bother to protect them, they’ve already been exposed to the virus. My wife Carol loves to remind me that had she been forced to listen to the white bread school approved poems, she would never have been attracted to poetry. When she found out poetry could break those boundaries, that poetry could swear like real people, she found something worth reading.

Besides, your kids hear bad language in every PG-13 movie, and on most TV shows, especially on cable. Did you let your kids watch True Blood? Do they watch Buffy reruns? Holy Shit, they’re humping on Buffy all the time and that’s kid’s fare. You’ll even catch the occasional blue word and scene on the Disney Family channel. They use it to boost the ratings.

Speaking of which, I watch kids TV today and Delbert seemed tame by comparison. He wouldn’t even end up in today’s principal’s office. I worked with Charter Schools in Texas, the bread basket of the Bible Belt, the Holy Mother of God’s land of Righteousness. Trust me, these Christian kids could take down Delbert in any trash talking contest. (Holy Mother of... I give up. I now declare this a faux disclosure zone. Every thing I disclose is made up for the purpose of making a point. It’s true, but a useful fiction for the point of my biography.)

Protect your kids from bad language in poems? There is so much worse in the world, people. For four years I left college teaching to work with a charter school. One of my students had to clean the condoms, beer bottles and needles from her bedroom after mom’s tricks dropped by. Why? Because her mother didn’t want to trash her own room. One of my student’s father beat him with a belt because he didn’t properly honor his father the way scripture told him. One of my students genuinely believed smoking pot all day was good for him because his father did it and he never had to work a day in his life. One student intentionally got pregnant because she believed her thirty-year-old boyfriend would marry her and take her out of school. (He dumped her.) I can no longer recall the number of students who were raped before their junior year. In Texas, Black and Hispanic students are inherently disadvantaged because they have to pass a standardized test to graduate from high school, while white students can transfer to private schools where the same tests aren’t required.

And because I have already shared enough biography, I won’t tell you some of the hair raising shit that my two sisters and I, as good Baptist Preacher’s children, were exposed to. (I know, the correct form is “to which we were exposed.” But the correct form didn’t <spoiler>fucking</spoiler> scan as well, okay?) Not exposed to by our Baptist family, who were by any standard, bat shit crazy (with cousins marrying at fifteen, my uncles telling one nigger joke after another at family gatherings even though we knew them all by heart, my grandfather scribbling out entire passages in his encyclopedia in bright red ink that differed with his interpretation of the Holy Word and everyone picking apart the arcana of scripture at family dinner to the point that faces would sometimes turn as red as the ink in that encyclopedia), but from the good Christian families at the church, including the children of the Deacons who paid my father’s salary, and the Head Pastor’s children, who may have been scariest of all.

Poetry and fucking are joined at the hip

Let’s face it, poetry and sex predate Sappho. Poetry has long been a key element of the ritual of seduction. Maybe not with the pickup truck dating crowd, where seduction is reduced to booze and forcing a girl whether she wants to or not. But certainly in my crowd where brains and desire were as much a part of seduction as fumbling with buttons and bras.

Readers may recall that when our teachers made us read Chaucer, at least one of us was bound to point out the bawdy passages—including the Miller’s Tale which featured adultery and carousing. What you may not know is that Chaucer’s liberal use of the word “queint” is actually the middle English word for our word “cunt.” (So when you refer to something as “quaint” you are really saying its “cuntish,” which should make any modern feminist bristle, with some justification.)

The interrelation of poetry and sex becomes clearer with the metaphors of poetic deconstruction left to us by Derrida. He reminded us the pen is a penis ejaculating the seed of meaning on the folded page of poetry (the hymen) and each time the page opens, a new meaning blossoms. Sadly, the metaphor loses something in translation when poems are posted on the web. We may have to be satisfied with more sterile image of fingertips massaging the keyboard/clitoris. Still, sexuality cannot be circumcised from poetry no matter how hard parents try.

I could give you a list of erotic poetry to prove my point, but I’ll go straight for the jugular. The ultimate fucking poem. The prize poem of the Hebrew language, The Song of Songs. Fundamentalists will howl and scream to hear me call it a poem about fucking, and swear it’s an allegory, a poem that symbolizes the love of the body of Christ. Maybe it is, but at the same time, from the other side of their mouth, any good Fundamentalist will tell you the Bible is literal. Every word written on its pages is literal. There is no allegory or symbolism. So they can’t fudge when it comes to The Song of Songs. If parents want to protect their kids from evil sexual poetry, they need to keep them away from the Bible.

They also might want to keep them away from the Bible to avoid exposing them to all that violence, and betrayal. For instance Jepthah, who promised to sacrifice the first creature to cross his gate if he won a battle. It was his daughter, so he sacrificed her. Or Jezebelle, whose enemies tossed her underneath horses to be trampled to death. Or Jael, who smashed a sleeping man’s skull with a hammer and tent peg. Or how about the death of Absalom, who was hanged in a tree by his long hair? Only that took too long so his father King David’s men finished him off with spears.

Nor am I knocking the Bible. I’m still Christian. I’ve read the Bible a dozen times, which is how I know it’s no stranger to profanity, and not just “damn” and “hell.” Even Paul unleashed the occasional blue word. For instance, in Philippians where he wrote, “I have suffered the loss of all things, and do count them but crap....” And, believe it or not, there are other examples such as “piss,” and “bitch.” I could go on with my list of examples, but you need to read for yourself to see.

Oh, I know, good old King James used the word “dung” in Philippians instead of “crap,” but “dung” and “crap” and “shit” are synonyms. Sorry, parents, they mean the same thing, so why is “dung” okay for your kid to read, but not “shit?”

Which brings me to:

A history lesson in profanity and discrimination in language use

When I taught college freshman English I would put the following lists on the board and ask students to tell me the difference between the two:

shit defecate
piss urinate
f__k* intercourse
damn anathematize
lie prevaricate
steal expropriate
yell vociferate

*Notice I used grawlix in this example. These were college freshmen, and the last thing I needed were endless complaints to the Dean about corrupting influences on young minds during their first weeks in college.

The students inevitably leaped to the conclusion that the words in the left list were the “bad” words and the words in the right list were “good” words, even though the last three words in the “bad” list are acceptable in any conversation. I also doubt any of the students knew the meanings of the last four words in the “good” list until they saw them paired with their “bad” counterparts. In fact, had any of my students encountered those words before, I feel certain they would have sailed over their heads without ruffling the surfaces of their short term memories.

After pointing this fact out to them, I would provide a history lesson. Granted real historians could ream me over the coals for the lesson’s authenticity, but they were freshmen. I would’ve been lucky if they remembered there was a list by the end of the semester.

In 1066 the Normans (French) invaded England and took power from the Saxons, a backstory easy to remember if you watched any Robin Hood movie. The Normans replaced the Saxon’s language (left column) with their Latinate based polysyllabic language (right column). Why? Because that’s what people in power do. As a result the Saxon language earned a reputation for being brutish and crude, and the Norman became the language of educated and polished speakers and writers.

In reality, however, American speakers and writers only gravitate toward the Norman column when they’re referring to bodily functions. The rest of the time they avoid any words with more than two syllables. Notice, however, that those preferred Saxon-based words are the words most curse words come from. So why do we prefer Saxon-based words for all of the words in our vocabulary except for when we refer to our bodies?

It’s the fucking French, who, when they were in power, made us feel ashamed and crude. We may have thrown the yoke of power of when Cromwell pitched them from power, and restored our language, but the psychic shame never went away. It’s time to liberate our minds and free all of our language so that we can free our poetry for our children from the last vestiges of the insidious French influence. Any Tea Party Patriot and forebearer of Faithful Fundamentalism should demand this little of our language.

Which leads me to suggest that a word is just a word. Its “goodness” or “badness” is all in our heads. There is no difference between “poop,” “dung,” and “shit,” or “fucking,” “intercourse” and “sex.”

If you’re going to say “fluff,” as my niece used to say, why not just call it a “fart?” Sure, “fluff” sounds prettier, but a fluff still stinks. Some people may think it matters what word you use to describe the same damn thing, but if we recall Jesus’ views on real and imaginary adultery (and he would have to be the expert, wouldn’t he) a word is a word is a word.

I think I’ve exhausted this subject. So with all of these thoughts in mind, please let me close with:

An example of appropriate profanity (combined with an ingenious, not to mention self-serving, product plug)

I believe the case can be made that sometimes words that are ordinarily believed to be profanity are not only acceptable, they may be the best choice for the situation at hand.

Consider the following passage taken from my own novel Raising Hell, which, because of my kindness and fundamentally Christian and anti-capitalist leanings, can be purchased for the remarkably generous price of $1:

“Wouldn’t you admit that there are times when things just spin completely out of control and create this huge mess? And when all these things happen, the only thing you can do is wait for them to end and then clean up the mess or leave it lying around to annoy you?

“I mean a really nasty mess. Something stinking and obnoxious. But you can mean it metaphorically too. You can’t deny those situations happen, can you? I mean, you might say my being here is one of those situations, couldn’t you?”

Lucifer drummed his fingers on the desk.

“Think about what happened to you, sir. You think God should maybe give you a little bit bigger piece of the pie, right? Maybe stop acting so high and mighty, right? So you share your opinion with a couple of other angels, and BAM…”

He slapped his hands together, startling Byron who dropped a pen which, in turn, spilled ink on the rug.

Pilgrim didn’t skip a beat. “… Before you know it, you’re cast out of heaven and left to run this shit hole. I mean, wouldn’t that be one of the situations I’m describing?”

“You could be right,” Lucifer admitted as he imagined a list of new hells he could create just for this soul.

“Well, there you go, sir. If those situations exist, then we need a word to describe them.”

Lucifer didn’t like where this was going. He rolled his eyes and waved his hand at the pitiful soul to get on with it, to get to the bottom line.

“Shit’s that word. And it’s a pretty good word when you get right down to it. Short and to the point. You get it out right away. Then you’re done with it.”

“Are you coming to a point? Or do you intend to endlessly endorse the efficacy of excrement?”

“That was my point.”

Lucifer continued to drum his fingers. Wisps of smoke drifted from the desk where his fingertips hammered at the surface.

“How about this then? Is it a sin to use this perfectly good word to describe those perfectly awful situations? Or is it a sin to have all these awful situations and also have this perfectly good word to describe them, but send everyone to hell when they use it?”

Lucifer stared at Pilgrim. He imagined Pilgrim’s pink flesh oozing through the meat grinder’s holes. He found himself totally unable to answer.

“Does that mean you see my point?”

Lucifer snapped out of his fugue and kicked his desk at Pilgrim, toppling him from his chair. “See your point?” he shouted. “Of course I don’t see your point. That has to be the most half-assed, cock-eyed, ill conceived, pinheaded idea I’ve heard in an eternity of listening to half-assed, cock-eyed, ill conceived, pinheaded ideas.”

He ripped a whip from his exotic weapons collection and flayed Pilgrim with it, over and over again, laughing maniacally as the flesh and blood splattered on his carpet like paint on a Jackson Pollock canvas. “What do you think of your half-assed, cock-eyed, ill conceived, pinheaded idea now?”

Pilgrim brushed himself off, picking off some of the larger, looser pieces of skin with his finger, and said, “I think you’re afraid to admit I’m right, so you’re punishing me to save face.”

Lucifer cracked the whip against the desk and shouted, “Afraid to admit I’m right?”

“It’s not a criticism, sir.”

Lucifer felt veins three through twelve pop. Then he blew his carotid artery. “I’ll show you saving face,” he said. He spread his wings and hurdled over his desk, grabbing Pilgrim between his claws. He lashed Pilgrim with his tail and kicked him with his hooves until Pilgrim parts lay scattered across the floor and his own fury sated.

Lucifer kicked his desk. “Shit,” he shouted. He kicked it several more times, shouting, “Shit! Shit! Shit!” He thumped his tail on the floor several times, shaking the paintings and the books on the shelves. Then he remembered he was wearing his good toreador pants.

He slipped them off and found a huge split down the back seam where his tail sliced through. “Shit,” he shouted, throwing his pants into the fire. He kicked the bookshelves, shouting “Shit! Shit! Shit!” until every book in the shelves fell out, pounding him on the head, shoulders and wings.

Dazed, Lucifer finally managed to get a grip on his temper. He inspected the pile of books on the floor and his cracked cloven hoof. He could think of only one word that would truly express what he felt at that moment. “Shit,” he said to himself.

Then he said it again.