Poetry and Misogyny

You think guys who write poetry are probably kind and sensitive. Not always! And once in a while, you'll come across some guy who's written something that's really awful toward women, and the poem seems to be fairly well-received anyway. 


I already wrote about that one Stephen Dobyns poem, so we won't revisit that.


Philip Larkin is best-known for his iconic poem "This Be the Verse." This next poem has also made it into a lot of anthologies. It's weird and awful and terrific...


Animals Are Passing From Our Lives


It's wonderful how I jog
on four honed-down ivory toes
my massive buttocks slipping
like oiled parts with each light step.

I'm to market. I can smell
the sour, grooved block, I can smell
the blade that opens the hole
and the pudgy white fingers

that shake out the intestines
like a hankie. In my dreams
the snouts drool on the marble,
suffering children, suffering flies,

suffering the consumers
who won't meet their steady eyes
for fear they could see. The boy
who drives me along believes

that any moment I'll fall
on my side and drum my toes
like a typewriter or squeal
and shit like a new housewife

discovering television,
or that I'll turn like a beast
cleverly to hook his teeth
with my teeth. No. Not this pig. 



EXCEPT. What exactly the HELL is going on in the fourth, fifth and sixth lines from the end? It's distracting and weak: hurr hurr, housewives are so stupid.


Roger McGough is even more irritating. He wrote a lot of the dialogue for the animated feature Yellow Submarine, which maybe doesn't seem as insufferable if you've dropped acid. He also gave us this:

The Newly Pressed Suit 

Here is a poem for the two of us to play.

Choose any part from the following: 

       The hero

       The heroine

       The bed

       The bedroom

       The newly pressed suit

(I will play the VILLAIN)

The poem begins late this evening

            at a poetryreading

Where the hero and the heroine

Are sitting and drinking and thinking

            of making love.

At 10.30 they leave the pub and hurryhome.

Once inside the flat they waste no time.

The hero quickly undresses the heroine,

carries her naked into the bedroom

and places her gently upon the bed

like a newly pressed suit.                       

Just then I step into the poem.

With a sharp left hook

I render unconscious the hero

And with a cruel laugh

Rape the heroine

(The raping continues for several stanzas)

Thank you for playing.

When you go out tonight

I hope you have better luck in your poem

Than you had in mine. 

McGough, by the way, is at least as well known for his children's books as for his poetry.

The poem has an entertaining conceit that doesn't go anywhere, and the poet tries to disguise the fact that he's really got nothing by saying something outrageous. I think it's possible to say something funny about rape, but "HAHAHA THEN I COME IN AND RAPE YOU A LOT, THE END" isn't it. 

McGough was included in the 1973 version of the Oxford book Of Twentieth Century Verse. It wasn't the jolly raping poem, though, it was this random piece of crap. Larkin was the editor. Actually McGough had two poems in there, but I have better things to do than Google him all day.

Misogynistic poems are luckily pretty rare these days, but when they show up they get defended with a couple of arguments:

1. It's ironic!

If it's not completely clear that the poet's being ironic, he doesn't get a pass. Besides, I'm sick of irony. So often, it's just gutless. You have something to say, say it. Otherwise why are you even writing poetry?

2. But it's art!

The idea here is that art and poetry exist on this rarified plane where the artist has perfect freedom and the very idea of ethics is bourgeois and doesn't apply. Ethics always apply.