Organ Grinder:
News for Pervy Little Monkeys

Your intrepid reporter has just returned from four verbose days at the National Poetry Slam, which was held in Seattle last weekend. I am bloated like a snake that has eaten an entire encyclopedia. I am drunk on language. I am a tree frog, covered in a thick foam of poetic spooge. It's not as grotesque as it sounds.

I attended some excellent shows, the "Down There" erotica reading, and the Queer showcase were among them. I heard satiric poems about funny sex, queer poems about queer sex, boring poems about no sex. I heard poems about AIDS, death, the revolution, Mom, Take Back the Night, abortion rights, and America. Strangely, one subject that I didn't hear about with any great frequency was love. With a few notable exceptions, good old erotic love got left behind with the cat, the roommates, and last years' chapbooks. I'm pretty sure I know why, too.

Slam poetry is a pop medium. Theoretically, it is a contest to reward the performance poet who most appeals to the public. Unfortunately, the reality of our taste for politic, tragedy and rage is pretty terrifying to any artist who values beauty, subtlety, and love. Judging by the judges' scores, we are a culture that is much more comfortable with anger and disillusionment than with simplicity and contentment. But this is not a column about the poetry slam. I use the example only because it is a microcosm of the larger world.

It's easy to write satirically about sex. Sex and humour were meant to go together. Why else would the Creator have invented vaginas that occasionally sound like whoopee-cushions? In a culture as uptight as ours, sex is a subject that is guaranteed to garner attention. You can write about specifics ("…then he enters me from behind"), fantasy (then the sweaty fireman enters me from behind"), or political sex ("Then Andrea Dworkin enters me from behind.") Not that it's simple territory; people's response to explicit material in this neo-puritan society is riddled with double standards. For example, if a poet writes about STD's, anti-porn sentiment, gender issues, or rape, she is a righteous babe/warrior; but if she writes about how much she likes to fuck, she is accused of pandering. If a comic writes too often about sex, she is thought of as lowbrow, quite literally referred to as "dirty". So much for freedom of speech. In a weird, double-handed way, North Americans are as moralistic as we ever were. And we wonder why Dutch people laugh at us.

Writing about love, on the other hand, is like shooting at pineapples in the dark. It is dangerous, messy, terrifying. Writing about love is wrestling with weird ghosts, ectoplasmic riots of the spirit, intoxication of the senses. Love is the Bermuda Triangle of the intellect, the place where reason lists to starboard and navigational instruments become unreliable. I'm not one to believe in love as a falling; love never seems so passive. Infatuation can be uncontrollable, but to me, true lovers are pumpers of handcarts on old-fashioned railways. Love requires effort; sweating, swaying, holding on for dear life, that is being in love.

I am glad to say that I am in such a state at the moment. The whole world can smell it, and I am powerless to halt these blissful emissions. I am stricken with a love-gas that no Imodium can cure. I am asthmatic with love and the world is my humidifier. I am fat with love, and my cynicism is a too-tight girdle that I have donated to the Sally Ann. But writing about love is thankless; it's like writing about old dogs at the pound: nobody really gives a damn about love unless it belongs to them.

It's hard to write about love. Shakespeare did pretty well at it. Rumi had it down. I wonder if the day will ever come that loving will again be fashionable in my time? In a society whose poets and writers are so concerned with politics that they can't sit down to write an honest loving word, whose ecstasy is a synthetic drug and whose definition of passion equals rage, where will the great stories come from? The poetry that defines us? The abiding spirit of our generation? To paraphrase the Captain & Tennille, the love that keeps us together?

Damn, I must be getting old. Going on about abiding spirits. Next week I think I'll write about dildos or condoms or anything but love. I'm so glad this is a sex column. Yes, it's much easier to write about sex.