TWO THINGS TOUCHING

On the erotics of poetry

by Claressinka Anderson

A space must be maintained or desire ends.

— Anne Carson

It’s London in the late 1990s. Somewhere in Dalston, the teenage, cyberpunk version of me togethered herself with strangers at an all-night, underground trance party, dozed on someone’s couch for a few hours, then walked most of her way across the city in the pink hours of the morning, to find herself here: in love, not with a person but a sculpture.

Two massive, concave, stainless-steel discs hang on opposing walls of a majestic corridor. She moves through them sentinels of space and air they are soundless birds, choiring with silence. She wonders if she’s still under the violet spell of last night’s dove, but that pill-induced version of love has long since worn off. The thrill she now feels is for the music between these two objects the way their mirrored bodies reflect each other, and her fleeting, warped mass between them the fact that they hold this thing they never touch.

It was during this early encounter with an Anish Kapoor sculpture that I first understood something about the charged nature of liminality, how most of the time the space between two objects is more important than the objects themselves. I didn’t understand why I felt what I did, but I did understand what I felt as desire, and from then on, along with everyone else who has ever loved something other than themselves, I’d be forever bridging the gap.

In Susan Sontag’s 1966 essay “Against Interpretation,” she called for an “erotics of art” in opposition to the prevailing hermeneutic modes of art criticism. Her argument centered around the importance of attention to form and sensory experience. “The function of criticism,” she wrote, “should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.” That is to say, how the form of a thing makes you feel. When it comes to critical thinking, “feeling” is, for some, a dirty word. Feeling, after all, is not “critical,” nor is it “thinking.” It is about the body.

I have long seen the poem as a bodily entity its form a type of musculature built from the sinews of line breaks and the bones of syntax. As readers, we move through the language of a poem and around the edges of its form. In poetry, as in visual art, feeling is generated through an experience of form, the poem’s shape being a container for language and meaning. The teenage girl in love with Kapoor’s sculpture was already writing poems about love and longing, but what I didn’t understand then was just how much my obsession with poetry’s “shape” was rooted in it being literature’s liminal, erotic object.

A decade after Sontag, Audre Lorde, in her seminal 1978 essay “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power,” spoke of the erotic as a fundamental assertion of a woman’s agency and life force. For Lorde, as for Sontag, the erotic was a reminder of our “capacity for feeling.” She described the erotic space between two people as a bridge formed by “the sensual — those physical, emotional, and psychic expressions of what is deepest and strongest and richest within each of us.” If the erotic is a bridge, it is also an experience of crossing, of coming up against an edge. With its line breaks and silences, a poem is an object made of edges ideal home for the rhetorical and conceptual spaces of eros.

Let’s consider, for a moment, the function of a poem’s line break as metonymy for the erotic nature of liminal space. The line break acts as the space between two things words, ideas the metaphorical space between two things touching. Bodies and language. Writer and reader. It could be said to function as a type of sexual delay, heightening tension; a line break withholds, keeping the reader in a state of longing. In this way, reading a poem may be seen as an act of eros we experience it in a state of desire, each line or place where the poem breaks, a brief mystery.

The word liminal, like limbo, comes from the Latin term limbus, meaning “border” or “edge.” An edge is a precipice, a decision; you can remain, or you can cross. My early experience with the Kapoor began a lifelong obsession with “the space between.” I sought out books, art, movies — even relationships — that embodied liminality in some way. Why are we fascinated with these purgatorial spaces? Are we, as humans, simply wired for longing?

The ancient Greeks most simply defined eros as “want” struck by the god Eros’s arrow, the wounded subject is stunned into an immediate state of lack and concomitant desire for the missing object. Eros then, by definition, is to be “in desire of.” Desire is an experience of longing. If we gave eros a “shape,” it would look a lot like a poem: a space between two points, and between those points, language’s play between intimacy and distance, withholding and giving. As Anne Carson so beautifully articulates in her book-length essay, Eros the Bittersweet (1986), eroticism lives in the space between two things; most fervently at its tensile edges:

What is erotic about reading (or writing) is the play of imagination called forth in the space between you and your object of knowledge. Poets and novelists, like lovers, touch that space to life with their metaphors and subterfuges. The edges of the space are the edges of the things you love, whose inconcinnities make your mind move. And there is Eros, nervous realist in this sentimental domain, who acts out of a love of paradox, that is as he folds the beloved object out of sight into a mystery, into a blind point where it can float known and unknown, actual and possible, near and far, desired and drawing you on.

Without imagination and distance, we are incapable of longing; once in possession, an object is no longer desired.

I’ve often wondered if my visceral encounter with the Kapoor sculpture was, in fact, a subconscious projection of the liminal shape my life would take, those suspended discs my fate’s winged harbingers. Only a few years later, I fell ill with a severe and mysterious illness. What began as a regular upper respiratory virus turned into an unexplained viral inflammation of my brain; what followed was a long period of living outside of the world and myself a purgatorial hell of which only Dante would be proud. Chronic illness sent me into a perpetual state of desire, not for anyone or anything (though I may have erroneously tried to make it so), but for my own body to return to me.

For years I was bedridden and homebound, plagued by an endless list of physical and neurological symptoms. Unable to tolerate bright light, my days were spent encircled by the purple walls of the old basement bedroom in my parent’s house, to which I had been forced to return. To watch TV or do anything that required even the smallest quotient of concentration was almost impossible. Words on the page swirled. With my head propped up by a pillow, I looked only at the ceiling or out the window. I existed in a netherworld between life and death, the light a muted messenger from above.

I remember thinking about Francesca Woodman at this time, an artist I also loved from a young age. When she was 22 the same age I was when I fell ill Woodman committed suicide, leaving behind a visionary body of work. Whether it was dissolving into the forest with tree trunks cuffed around her wrists, or photographing herself behind wallpaper in an abandoned house, she was always in the act of disappearing. Her work explored gender, sexuality, and identity through self-portraiture, and in her images, she was always on the edge of the frame, a position both literal and metaphorical. Even when she was wholly “there,” she was receding into the background, ever in some state of in-betweenness. It’s hard not to surmise, whether she knew it at the time or not, that she was preparing for her death.

Georges Bataille called eroticism “a psychological quest not alien to death.” Desire wouldn’t exist if we didn’t know we were going to die; death is the ultimate edge on which all desire teeters. And the erotic, as Lorde surmised, is a fundamental assertion of living. In direct opposition to death, the erotic as embodiment of life force, as breath itself continually pushes up against and resists death. In the oblivion of sex, our bodies come up against an ending, and also an endlessness. In poetry, the line break, too, mirrors the trajectory of eros in its action of giving and withholding language. Orgasm as “petit mort,” as small death, is also a physical embodiment of silence the place beyond language. In that place, we are also reminded of the gap between the “you” and the “I,” a territory seemingly impossible to bridge. And yet.

It is no surprise that death and eroticism often meet in a poem. In Frank Bidart’s 1997 poem “The Yoke,” the poet attempts to close this impossible gap through entering the space of lyric time the literal “now” of the poem. It is the profound loss of a dead beloved’s body, now absent, that is called upon to return. The sleepless speaker tosses and turns in bed, pleading with the beloved to turn his face, once more, towards the speaker. The poem begins: don’t worry I know you’re dead but tonight turn your face again toward me

Bidart immediately asserts that he knows the beloved is dead, but nevertheless asks for him to turn his face. In the lyric present, anything can happen; in Bidart’s poem, the fiction of lyric temporality is highlighted through a type of ritualistic address. The most obvious place where this happens in poetry is through elegy, but in love poems too, it occurs when an absent or dead beloved is summoned to return or live once more on the page.

As he does across his body of work, Bidart italicizes certain sections of the poem. Here, it appears the italicized parts are addressed specifically to the beloved, and the non-italicized parts are the places where reader, beloved, and the internal world of the poet are conflated. The middle of the poem has one long repetitive line: “I sleep and wake and sleep and wake and sleep and wake and” followed by a stanza break, and then, “but tonight / turn your face again // toward me.” The long line describes, in the first person, what the speaker is doing. The temporality of it is unclear. The speaker could be sleeping and waking over a long period of time, and the length of the line syntactically suggests the discomfort with that ongoing action; but the word “tonight” brings us directly into the lyric now. The “tonight” of the poem is, of course, now past, but, much like the dead beloved, fully present for the reader as they read the poem.

“The Yoke” highlights the ways in which the language of a lyric poem affects narrative temporality or lyric time. Jonathan Culler, in his dense and marvelous book Theory of the Lyric (2015), states that direct address in a poem “resists narrative because its ‘now’ is not a moment in a temporal sequence but a special ‘now’ of discourse: of writing and of poetic enunciation. […] [I]t seems to be one of the things toward which lyric strives: that iterable time when language can say ‘now.’” And the place where language can say “now” is on the page the conceptual and rhetorical spaces of the page where anything can transpire.

Bidart writes, “see upon my shoulders is the yoke / that is not a yoke.” The speaker makes clear that he knows this is all a fiction, another trick of lyric time. This italicized stanza is the poem’s heart much like the imagined beloved coming back from the dead, the yoke exists, but of course, also doesn’t. Both entities live only in the imagination of the poem.

The last two stanzas of the poem reprise the first but are not italicized: don’t worry I know you’re dead but tonight turn your face again

Bidart’s speaker becomes an internal voice once more, the reader a witness to his inner thinking. The reader is an omniscient voyeur, witnessing not only the performative aspects of the speaker’s ritualistic requests to the beloved but also the internal worlds of the poet to which the dead beloved no longer has access. So much of what is also implied in this haunting poem from Bidart’s 1997 collection Desire lives off of the page, in the bed of these two lovers that once were.

Through sex, whether with another person or with ourselves, we enter a liminal space, connect with our bodies as a possible site for altered consciousness. It’s sacred precisely because it’s marked by brevity. It’s temporal, a felt intimacy with the present moment. It’s a place we visit but never stay, and in it we can reclaim something of ourselves the lost parts, perhaps. Liminality is also a type of restlessness. It’s the no longer to the not yet; both an in-between and a force for movement. For me, sex was always a place where my healthy body returned to me for a time, however briefly. It continues to be a place my body can exist outside of illness: I’m here, now. I’m free. A poem acts in the same way for me. Each line pushes us up against an inevitable ending: I’m here, now. I’m free.

In Bernadette Mayer’s 1968 poem “First Turn to Me,” Mayer uses form to heighten the eroticism of an already sexually explicit poem, employing many bends and turns both syntactical and bodily. This poem about a “couple” appropriately takes the form of couplets. Mayer begins with a literal turn:

First turn to me after a shower, you come inside me sideways as always in the morning you ask me to be on top of you, then we take a nap, we’re late for school you arrive at night inspired and drunk there is no reason for our clothes we take a bath and lie down facing each other, then later we turn over, finally you come

The turns and returns of the body mimic the rhythmic turns of the poem, the way the line breaks create turns of their own, the snaking of the bodily movements and their corresponding language down the page. The lengthy poem proceeds in this manner, describing various states of coupling, each couplet a different sexual position, scenario or “turn.” The paradox of eros the push / pull of it inhabits the poetic turns as well as the line breaks, which are interconnected. Towards the end, the speaker’s “exhaustion” from the endless couplings turns metapoetic when the couplets reference themselves: we lie together one night, exhausted couplets and we don’t make love. does this mean we’ve had enough? watching t.v. we wonder if each other wants to interrupt the plot; later I beg you to read to me

Here, reading, too, is made erotic through begging. In this scene, one can imagine the poem turning in on itself and being read aloud, its inhabitants reading it to themselves.

In her direct address to the beloved, the speaker in Mayer’s poem could be referring to a singular relationship as seen through different life stages (pre-children, afterchildren, affairs, old age), but it is likely many lovers and myriad relationships that are mirrored in the “one” beloved’s reflection. The nature of desire in the poem takes on a universal, mythic quality as prefaced in the following stanza: you suck my cunt for a thousand years, you are weary at last I remember my father’s anger and I come

In the first line of the couplet, the speaker becomes all women, and through her focus on her father, the arresting second line is a wider commentary, too, on the centuries-long anger, pleasure, and violence exchanged within intimate relationships. In the final two stanzas of the poem, the singular beloved once again becomes a “they”:

I come three times before you do and then it seems you’re mad and never will it’s only fair for a woman to come more think of all the times they didn’t care

Mayer ends the poem with an opening an invitation to the reader towards an expansive, if overwhelming thought. Shedding light on all that has gone before, it is the final turn of the poem and brings us back to the beginning of the proverbial merry-goround.

The poet Octavio Paz also touches on poetry’s circular nature in The Double Flame: Love and Eroticism (1993): “Language is naturally linear; words follow one after the other like running water. In a poem, linearity twists back on itself, retraces its steps, meanders; the straight line ceases to be the archetype and is replaced by the circle and the spiral.” As a result, “we discover that the poem presents us with another sort of communication, one governed by laws different from those that rule the exchange of news and information.” When compared to other forms of writing, the lyric poem most often resists narrative or a direct progression from a to b. As readers, we come to rely on this type of resistance to closure, an ending that circles back to the beginning a kind of eternal return. In Mayer’s poem, that final line becomes yet another metaphor for the endless couplings and re-couplings of romantic relationships. We end in a kind of emptiness or post-coital numbness. There is no punctuation, no full stop. The poem simply runs into silence.

Silence is fundamental to poetry’s form, not only in the sense that it is the place from which a poem begins and ends but also in the fact that, between that beginning and ending, every line break pushes against many small silences. Jorie Graham, in her 1984 essay “Some Notes on Silence,” writes about it as the place where language gives way to another expression: “Silence which is awe or astonishment, the speech ripped out of you. All forms of death and mystery, therefore working in each poem against the hurry of speech […] Its emissaries are white space, of course, the full stops. But, also, all acts of grammar, which are its inroads.” Syntax, lineation, punctuation they are all instructors in silence, in anticipation. “A poem,” Paz writes, “could be defined as a verbal organism that produces silence.” In the pauses and silences, we are allowed to feel, making silence an important part of a poem’s erotics an idea that circles back to Sontag’s belief that the experience of art belongs in the realm of feeling. In Mayer’s poem, making the reader think of all the times “they didn’t care” turns us back to sensation, asks us to consider how it feels. What this poet wants, ultimately, is to evoke something ineffable to transcend language and evoke an emotional response. The language of poetry also highlights the limits of language, and in this place where language fails, sensation, feeling, the body begins.

One of the most important things a poet can do is to make choices about silence — when and how we feel it. The written word makes us more aware of our edges where I end and you begin the edges of speech and language as markers of silence. The line break makes us wait like a breath before lips touch. Carson writes, “we are finally led to suspect that what the reader wants from reading and the lover wants from love are experiences of very similar design, and it embodies a reach for the unknown.” She continues: “as you perceive the edge of yourself at the moment of desire, as you perceive the edges of words from moment to moment in reading (or writing), you are stirred to reach beyond perceptible edges toward something else, something not yet grasped. […] It is the enterprise of eros to keep them so.”

Emily Dickinson was a poet who well understood eros’s relationship to the silence and its manifestations on the page. With all those em dashes reaching out into the great unknown, her approach to subject and form so often projected a shape of longing on the page. Her inventive punctuation and lineation could also be seen as a tactic to push against patriarchal modes of thinking. Dickinson’s early publishers and editors were threatened by her work, not only by her subject matter but also by her syntactical disruptions. In a 1975 essay about Dickinson, the poet Adrienne Rich writes about one of Dickinson’s publishers: “John Crowe Ransom, arguing for the editing and standardization of Dickinson’s punctuation and typography, calls her ‘a little home-keeping person’ who, ‘while she had a proper notion of the final destiny of her poems was not one of those poets who had advanced to that later stage of operations where manuscripts are prepared for the printer, and the poet’s diction has to make concessions to the publisher’s style book.’”

In “Wild Nights,” Dickinson uses lineation and the em dash in a flirtatious way, drawing the reader close and then pushing them away in a game of push/pull. We can see how the turns of her line are erotic and playful:

Wild nights Wild nights!

Were I with thee

Wild nights should be Our luxury!

Futile the winds

To a Heart in port

Done with the Compass

Done with the Chart!

Rowing in Eden

Ah, the Sea!

Might I but moor tonight

In thee!

Dickinson’s attention to form can be read as heightening the speaker’s longing, teasing the reader through their experience of the poem. In the first stanza, with the line break after “thee,” we are reminded of the distance between the speaker and her beloved. After the following line break, what will the wild nights be, we wonder? Ours. But we are made to wait for that answer. Lineation and punctuation (or lack thereof) are primary modes of controlling the pace of a poem and, of course, giving that important instruction in silence. The pauses and silences in Dickinson’s poem are key to our experience of it on the level of both sound and content. The em dash can be seen as an instruction in breath and delay. It stresses the succeeding empty space as formal metaphor for the unknown more actively than simply leaving the space blank.

In the third stanza, it is revealed that the “wild nights” in question are a storm, and we now understand that the speaker would welcome the storm were she together with her beloved. There are many interpretations possible, of course; the storm could also be seen as a distraction, or other lovers even, and while it may continue raging somewhere outside (and outside of the poem), the speaker’s desire remains steadfast and unaffected. The sexual metaphor of the boat mooring in the beloved is the climax of the longing set up earlier. Through the syntax of the line “Might I but moor ” the pause of the em dash, and then the “tonight ” we ask ourselves, where will the speaker moor and when? The em dashes give pause. Finally, we are given the relief of knowledge: “In thee.”

Throughout her work, Dickinson well understood the terms of desire as they pertain to eros. In her poem, “Hunger,” she wrote, “… so I found / That hunger was a way / Of persons outside windows, / The entering takes away.” As with Carson’s assertion that “a space must be maintained or desire ends,” we understand, through Dickinson’s window metaphor, that once we enter the desired space, our hunger is satiated. This desire dance is one of coming and going, concurrently joining through language and remaining separate. As Graham also proposed in “Some Notes on Silence,” “almost every poem illustrates one of the two impulses we experience: to be united with the unknown, to break out of this separateness, or to wrench a uniqueness, an identity, from the all-consuming whole.” This is the paradox of eros in life, and also in the process of writing and reading poetry.

All those years ago, when I stood before Kapoor’s opposing discs, I felt myself pierce the silence between them. In their mirrored faces, I witnessed two distorted reflections of a girl myself and not myself. Was I meant to be here? I wasn’t sure. The discs, like twin flames, looked out at one another, reflecting each other, but remaining entirely separate. I wanted to understand this liminal space, give it shape. By entering it, I thought perhaps I could, but I was an intruder, a word inserted in the wrong place. As I shifted and moved, I watched my reflection progressively migrate to the edge of each satellite, until I was just a blip, then gone completely from their orbit.

It seemed to me that what these discs wanted most of all was to preserve the empty space between them to merely contain. Their pleasure, ours, is in holding the absence. We don’t come to poetry for answers, we come to it to live with our questions, our longings, our desires. We come to it to feel. In the experience of art, as Sontag suggested, what is felt is more important than what is understood. Our questions thrive in the absences, the silent places where our imaginations travel beyond the page, the spaces between language, body, and touch. In this way, poetry will always be the erotic, transgressive voice through it, we forever gnaw at our edges.