I have been reading a fascinating article this week about how to improve creativity. One of the techniques included is ‘Think Love Not Sex’:
“Forster et al. (2009) found that when experimental participants were primed with thoughts of love they became more creative, but when primed with carnal desire they became less creative (although more analytical)
While it certainly isn't the first time that love has been identified as a creative stimulus, psychologists have suggested a particular cognitive mechanism.
Love cues us with thoughts of the long-term, hence our minds zoom out and we reason more abstractly and analogically. Sex meanwhile cues the present, leading to a concrete analytical processing style. For creativity, abstraction and analogy are preferred.”
The idea got me thinking about the golden rule of horror movies: ‘if you have sex in a horror film then you will die’. Is it possible that the reason that those who abstain during horror films survive is because they have the non-sexual lateral thinking skills required to see the bigger picture and spot the patterns and weaknesses in their antagonists? Or are horror films just preaching good old-fashioned Christian values as they graphically show us an endless slew of teens getting hacked up by a red-neck with a knife?
The idea of ‘sex = death’ holds true for live poetry readings too, but a far more painful type of death than the sort you would expect to see in a horror film.
If you go to enough live poetry readings, you will encounter this phenomenon. It is most prevalent in open-mic nights, but I have seen it done by proper, published, critically acclaimed poets too – depressingly.
I first encountered it in ‘Poetry Unplugged’, a fantastic live poetry night, hosted every Tuesday by Niall O’Sullivan. A 30-something, reasonably attractive bald man came to the microphone looking nervous, humble and eager to be liked. Sheepishly, tentatively and with his mouth plosive-poppingly close to the microphone, he read one of the most gratuitous descriptions of copulation I have ever heard. There was no art to it, it was just a bloke taking us through, blow by blow, what he intended to do to a certain lady.
It was crass, it was badly written and it made everyone in the room feel awkward. ‘What a uniquely deluded doosh-bag!’ I thought to myself as I watched the poet’s date for the night shrinking back into her plastic chair in the judgemental darkness of the poetry café.
But this was far from the only time that I have seen this genre of poem get a public airing. In fact 1 in 3 open-mic nights I attend is guaranteed to have some bashful pervert with a graphic incantation of the perfect orgasm to share.
And then I’m gonna rub your… right as my… and then we’ll just … but when you bite my … just two bodies merging … and you whisper that you … and that one perfect … ad infinitum
I mean honestly, it’s like porn for blind people.
I would probably feel more comfortable about this if it was only men that did it – society has more or less got me to accept that, being a man, I am a one-track-minded predator who will throw all logic out the window at the faintest whiff of a promiscuous prospect and there is not a damn thing I can do to prove otherwise. In fact, if The Girl With the Dragon Tattoo is on the money, then odds are that I’m a rapist too.
But this awful ‘erotic poetry’ thing that permeates the live-circuit seems to be about 50/50 with men and women. That’s right women. Women who seemed entirely well-adjusted, normal, down-to-earth types, approaching the microphone and giving all the juicy details of their sexual fantasies to a room full of strangers who only came hoping for a few nice couplets and the occasional piece about a deceased relative.
As you might have guessed, I don’t like poets talking about sex. It is invariably braggadocio or the sort of self-deprecating pseudo-humour that stand-up comedians use to discuss their ex-husbands and wives. A bit of rumpy-pumpy in fiction or cinema is fine with me, as it can be good to move a narrative forward, but poems should ideally seek to recreate the sensation of their subject and I’m yet to find a poem that replicates that particular sensation.
So join with me poets, we need to form a united front. The printed-poetry community needs your support with Salt’s Just One Book Campaign. The live-poetry scene needs your help to sift the smut of fatuous corporeal conquest recollections out of our open-mic gigs. Rise up as one and say it with me comrades…
Get The ‘Fuck’ Out of Live Poetry!
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Phil Brown
Poetry Editor
