6 - Appropriations

Summary

GENDER IN BOHEMIA

In 1957, Denise Levertov visited the San Francisco Bay Area for the first time. In order to introduce her to local poets Robert Duncan arranged a party that included, among others, Jack Spicer. On that occasion Spicer read from a new series called Admonitions, one poem of which seemed directed at the guest of honor, although its message was anything but honorific:

People who don't like the smell of faggot vomit

Will never understand why men don't like women

Won't see why those never to be forgotten thighs

of Helen (say) will move us into screams of laughter,

Parody (what we don't want) is the whole thing.

Don't deliver us any mail today, mailman.

Send us no letters. The female genital organ is hideous, We

Do not want to be moved.

Forgive us. Give us

A single example of the fact that nature is imperfect.

Men ought to love men

(And do)

As the man said

It's

Rosemary for remembrance.

Levertov's response to this hostile poem was to write “Hypocrite Women,” which takes Spicer's remark about female genitalia and turns it into an assertion of female power:

And if at Mill Valley perched in the trees

the sweet rain drifting through western air

a white sweating bull of a poet told us

our cunts are ugly–why didn't we

admit we have thought so too? (And

what shame? They are not for the eye!)

No, they are dark and wrinkled and hairy,

caves of the Moon …