Thursday, September 22, 2005

Celebrating the Body

AAP announced a new exhibit in the September newsletter: poems about the body, inspired by a similar exercise at Salon. It's a pretty good exercise, albeit fairly predictable. Personally, I'd like to have seen less Sylvia Plath and more younger contemporary poets.

In a very quick walk through my home library, I came across a few good options for an extended corporeal poetry collection:
  • Kelli Agodon's "New Hips" (These are softer than the ones I wore/before she grew inside me) from Small Knots.
  • BJ Ward's "Instructions for Using The Tongue" (Don't be too careful--/better to be overflowing/with what the tongue can offer./Sweet generosity returns to your soft mouth) from 17 Love Poems with No Despair.
  • Beth Ann Fennelly's "Three Months After Giving Birth, The Body Loses Certain Hormones" (And my hair starts falling out. Long, red hair on the sheets, clogging/every drain, woven through the forest/of my brush, baked into brownies,) from Tender Hooks

Seems there are three motifs to poems about the body: wistful for what it was, wishing for what it might do (and with whom!), or whimsical at what its state says about our state of mind. Anyone got one that doesn't fit one of these molds?

No comments: