Id for Ideology (Rated R for Sex and Capitalism)

[Cameron Clark]

I think this is one of your strongest meditations Jee, especially the section on pleasure that is so close to pain, which I think captures something vital, and captures it in the most delicate yet flexible lines.

[Dunc]

Jee

Jay ─ The social politics of slums and opportunities, summed up in what can only be called an analogy.

Leroy ─ Having googled the Elmhurst reference, I was with the argument in S2, and struck by the affection, the concern, latent in the apology of the voice.

Carlos ─ And this picture, although not without reflections, captures the physical in particular, the impressions of body at the time.

The philosophy of carnality is the philosophy of humans with humans.

Remarkable.

Regards / Dunc

[scraps]

Hi Jee,

Your poems rock out with their cocks out, no doubt. Just to say that it is fascinating to watch the index start to reveal a poem of its own - the kind of quiet beginnings in 2004 and 2005 and then something seems to happen (or maybe something stopped happening, like a monogamous relationship?) in October of 2006 and then the speed and frequency begins to go a little mad. For some reason, these Monday trysts have a different flavour to them; unexpected and a little bold knowing one probably has work in the morning?

Steve

[GreaterMandalaofUselessness]

Hi Jee,

I like the playful humour of Antonio, the "touching is disbelieving" line, and how you go from there to the New Testament theme: doubting Thomas his "finger in the wound" and then in the sestet, to "go like the apostles among the people". I like also "renewable resource and a community plan" calls back to the restaurants leaving for the suburbs fits in with what went before, but that I can read it that masturbation (or maybe just sex) is a renewable resource and they'll be proclaiming to the people before they settle down.

And the humour moves up a notch in Jay, an ode of sorts to the anus. Love it as "low income housing", "the land of the free and home of the brave" and as an area being gentrified. Very nicely done.

Leroy plays well with spiders and flies, following from the Web. I got a bit confused by googling Elmhurst and pandemic, and learning that Emhurst is in Illinois, further investigation led me to Elmhurst hospital though, which made things a lot clearer. The change in mood and tone from octet to sestet works really well for me, and the idea that we are all flies with the potential to be stuck and struggling is a truth well-expressed.

Carlos I really liked, "the tall hour chiming / our spasms" and also the sonics as well of the sense of "Sons of unheard mothers, it hurts" and how "unheard" echoes "uncut" in the octet.

Good to catch up with your thread.

-Matt

[Jee Leong]

Sarah, thanks for reminding me about the idealism behind social housing. It's definitely worth thinking about, Le Corbusier and others. The "peach blossoms" is my overly metaphorical way of referring to the recent murder of Asian women in Atlanta, Georgia. Asian women are often orientalized and exoticized by men in America.

Cameron, thanks for the vote! I like the balance between abstract and concrete in that one.

Dunc, analogy! I never thought of that! Haha. Now it must be inserted somewhere. Thanks, as always, for reading for voice as much as argument.

Steve, glad that you are reading the evolving Index. It will be the Contents page in a book, I hope, and present itself as a poem, as you said. You're absolutely right in your reading of the sequence of the trysts, about monogamy and Mondays. So perceptive!

Matt, thanks for lending your ear! I hope the poems are varied enough in their music and mood. I don't want to become as boring as Francis Bacon after a while.

[Jee Leong]

12. Mark, November 3, 2006 (Fri), Dante Café, lives on Amity Street, below Atlantic Ave, Brooklyn Heights
White, late 40s, poet. Blowjob, jerk-off, herpes but keeps covered. Strong shoulders and arms.


There is a circle in hell reserved for us,
not for fucking men, no, Jesus had 12
delicious pricks, not for writing poems,
Mark, though our gospels are obscene,
but for writing poems about sex and not
about capital as well, as if the multitudes
hungry and cold, are fed only Jesus’ jizz,
not with 12 baskets of loaves and fishes.

True, no one reads the Paradiso. We want
the sin, and the sinner, and the punishment,
we want to be burned, chilled, and severed.
It is our primal sin to be entirely personal,
not to find the blazing images for heaven,
but harp on the herpes and not the harpies.

[BrianIsSmilingAtYou]

Some challenging imagery and theology in the latest. I wonder how your doctrine that "It is our primal sin to be entirely personal" would square with evangelicals' belief in a personal God.

Keep writing.

BrianIs AtYou

[Donner]

Hi, Jee,

I'm afraid I wouldn't get through more than two poems if I were to use my sex diary. All two pages of it. Covering 69 years. : )

All of these so far are challenging, thoughtful and artful, and one doesn't have to agree with the theology, the morality, the history to learn from them and see the human-ness and shared longing in them. You've come a long way and I'm better for having read your work.

Donna

[5th column]

Wow - if your poems were a Twitter thread or You Tube channel the first three lines of the latest would be burning up the airwaves...

I’m reading that despite the title of the thread the N is suggesting they don’t / won’t write about capitalism - or at least not enough to be considered adequate by the ‘they’ most of us refer to without knowing who ‘they’ are...

[Jee Leong]

Thanks, Brian, Donna, and Neil, for reading and commenting. I'm glad to hear that you find the poems challenging, among other traits. [Sorry, Neil, for missing your comment at first. We must have cross-posted.)

[Jee Leong]

13. Brian, November 6, 2006 (Mon), NY Jacks
Thirties? White, cute face, a little balding and paunchy but nice shoulders, easy to talk to, grew up in London.


The problem with Great Expectations, Brian,
isn’t that Magwitch, shipped off to Botany Bay,
never to return on pain of death, is compared
to a black slave, when the poor white man
can, and does, work off his penal servitude
and, with a stroke of luck, obtain a sterling
fortune, to raise up a London gentleman.
Bad comparison, sure, but it’s not structural.

The problem is Pip, our hero. Redeemed, he
turns shipping clerk, joins his best pal in Cairo,
becomes a partner of the firm and, good man,
lubricates the Suez Canals of the British empire.
The problem is me. Fucked from afar, I can’t,
and don’t, teach the text but as a Bildungsroman.

[Scrow]

Being pragmatically minded I'm now fixated on how you keep herpes covered. A silken sheath? A plain condom? And how you tell your tryst that you have herpes. There's a complete no-nonsense down-to-it honesty about that which I admire. I read Steve's comment and looked at your index and aha - a story arc maybe. Anyway, I like how you're playing with Mark and the Dante cafe - weaving the names and place into this narrative. I love the first line of Brian, too. I have no idea why I like it so much, but I really do. I think it's because I'm imagining it being a conversation mid-tryst. That aside, it's interesting to see the teacher making another appearance, and something of the backstory/reflective character of the narrator showing through.

These are great. There's, for me, an honesty in the story that's starting to emerge now - with them together - something about vulnerability, about finding self, about finding self - not in unusual places but in encounters, I think. The sex bit is the least of it. The people and situation - fragility is the heart, I think, now - as they unfold.

Sarah

Sarah

[Hew]

Jee,

I've read the entire thread, seeking to gain from those who know you far better than I do or ever will the insights I lack due to lack of familiarity with the area in which you live and thrive. The use of journal entries as a starting point to stimulate memory and descriptions is interesting. Mingling history of the day with the personal history of the interactions starts one thinking how that idea might become a source for wordplay. Anyway, I have been journaling for over 25 years. Now I'm thinking whether going back would prove a useful stimulus for poetic rumination.

Thanks for sharing and for an idea,
Sincerely,
Hew

[shadygrove]

These are starting to cohere into a narrative -- the conversations about money and social justice -- capitalism -- and the physical connections. The way both of these things (that mansplaining that N does at Brian about the book he's teaching!) feel significant to us, the tremendous jolt of electricity in both an erotic encounter and a political conversation, but they're not. They don't add up to anything. We solve all the world's problems, build the architecture of love and the future together, and yet an hour later nothing has changed. We're just holding hands and circling a drain. The way the poems that are the diary entries themselves are starting to make their way into the more deliberate poetry, which highlights the tenderness and howling loneliness in each entry. Have you read Danez Smith's Don't Call Us Dead? This reads like an answer, or a questioning, of their work to me.

[Jee Leong]

Thanks, Sarah, Hew, and shady! Sorry for not replying at greater length, but an incredibly hectic morning, what with so many different calls on my time. Hope to circle back later.