The English Romantics were usually quite coy about sex and
sexuality; Byron not that much, the others very much indeed. One of the odd
facets of Neo-Romanticism is that the best bits of my poetry actually have as
much to do with French Neo-Classicism, especially Ingres, as they do with the
English Romantics, who I like to tease. Thus, this palimpsest over Wordsworth’s
Solitary Reaper, who he quite chastely listens to in the ever-present Romantic
enchanted forest, with its shuddering, resonant eco-system of sensations and
thoughts:
I said, “I can’t
even remember
the last time I
was excited, how
can I associate
ideas?”
She pulled
out a gun, a tube
of oil, and an air
cushion,
and it was
a spontaneous
overflow,
powerfully
felt, in which we
reaped together—
Ingres, and his Odalisque, does a similar trick over
Wordsworth’s coyness (they were contemporaneous), and also manages to create a
chiasmus between architecture and sex. The way Ingres paints his nude, her
architectural proportions, all the exquisite symmetries and scaffolding spaces,
are what make her of permanent interest. She’s a building and, as the song
goes, a brick house. Abby does a similar skyscraper trick in Meeting Halfway, which is frank on another level about sex and sexuality; not about the
architecture and tactility of bodies, but about queerness, and how the body
defines space in relation to its proclivities. That’s why Neo-Romanticism does
not need to fall into a rut in which I am accused of being a predatory male in
text, decimating women with my gaze; Abby’s presence redeems the whole package
deal we offer with the sense of the bodies she paints, including also The Walls Have Ears, signifying the architecture not only of sex, but of the thoughts
which sex builds in our mind out of the different, potentially queer, worlds we
inhabit. The architecture, as it were, of sexual identity. All the ways sex can
create ghosts or apparitions— that when two people sleep together, queer or
not, a third entity is created which hangs as a ghost presence over the two;
that being inside the body of another human being is potentially a dupe
situation, in which you are really nowhere, if you have not also penetrated the
other’s psyche; that bodily fluids around sexuality are ghostly or apparitional
substances; and that every person you sleep with, if examined closely, creates
another challenge of multiple meanings for those who wish to lead an
aesthetically and socially examined life— are also ways sex has of putting up
psychological scaffolding, which creates the phenomenological complexes which
define our individuality in relation to the world. Wordsworth and the rest are
too coy to get there; they remain in their own imaginations; Ingres and David,
on this level, are richer, and so my translation (I cannot speak for Abs) of
Ingres into text, flowing into poetry and also prose.
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