.
Farm girls and boys dancing to a jukebox at Mary's Place on U.S Highway 29 near Charlottesville, Virginia: photo by John Vachon, March 1943 (Farm Security Administration / Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
The orgasm completely
Takes the woman out of her
Self in a wave of ecstasy
That spreads through all of her body.
Her nervous, vascular and muscular
Systems participate in the act.
The muscles of the pelvis contract
And discharge a plug of mucus from the cervix
While the muscular sucking motions of the cervix
Facilitate the incoming of the semen.
At the same time the constrictions of the pelvic
Muscles prevent the loss of semen. The discharge
Makes the acid vaginal lubricant
Alkaline, so as not to destroy the spermatozoa.
TC: Sonnet: "The orgasm completely...", 1967, from Stones, 1969
Farm girls and boys dancing to a jukebox at Mary's Place on U.S Highway 29 near Charlottesville, Virginia: photo by John Vachon, March 1943 (Farm Security Administration / Office of War Information Collection, Library of Congress)
I wonder, by my troth, what thou, and I
Did, till we loved? were we not weaned till then,
But sucked on country pleasures, childishly?
John Donne (1572-1631), The Good Morrow, n.d. (after 1602), from Poems (published posthumously, 1633)
- Hamlet
- Lady, shall I lie in your lap?
Lying down at OPHELIA's feet
- Ophelia
- No, my lord.
- Hamlet
- I mean, my head upon your lap?
- Ophelia
- Ay, my lord.
- Hamlet
- Do you think I meant country matters?
- Ophelia
- I think nothing, my lord.
- Hamlet
- That's a fair thought to lie between maids' legs.
- Ophelia
- What is, my lord?
- Hamlet
- Nothing.
- Ophelia
- You are merry, my lord.
- Hamlet
- Who, I?
- Ophelia
- Ay, my lord.
- Hamlet
- O God, your only jig-maker. What should a man do
- but be merry? for, look you, how cheerfully my
- mother looks, and my father died within these two hours.
- Ophelia
- Nay, 'tis twice two months, my lord.
country: 'I could find out countries in her' (Comedy of Errors, III.ii.112-113): pudend and adjacencies.
country matters , or, in Quarto I, 'contrary matters', where, clearly, the same pun is intended. Immediately after the Hamlet quotation at lap: 'Do you think I meant country matters?'
It is clear that Hamlet meant, 'Do you think I am referring to sexual matters?': matters concerned with cunt; the first pronouncing element of country is coun. Ex. Old Fr cuntré (a fact not irrelevant): L. (terra) contrata.
Eric Partridge: Shakespeare's Bawdy, 1947
Well you know that it's a shame and a pity
You were raised up in the city
And you never learned nothing 'bout country ways,
Ah, 'bout country ways.
Country Joe McDonald: from Not So Sweet Martha Lorraine, 1967
It is, to a very large extent, the writers we discover at a critical juncture in our lives who influence what and how we write ourselves -- or, perhaps, even if we write at all. For me, it was Paul Carroll's The Young American Poets that changed-- literally, or perhaps, literarily -- my life. I discovered it on a shelf in my not very well stocked high school library when I was, maybe, sixteen. I suspect that if the librarian herself, or certainly the principal, had read the anthology, it would have been promptly removed... But no one else in the school ever did read that particular book because once I'd checked it out, I kept renewing it over and over and over again, and, I must confess, failed (unintentionally, I swear) to return it before I graduated. I didn't know what to make of... Tom Clark's "Sonnet," a clinical description of a female orgasm that was arranged into fourteen lines but obeyed none of the other rules for sonnets... It was all a far cry from the Romantic poets we were reading in sophomore English, where Wordsworth's "Intimations of Immortality" made me (blame it on adolescent hormones or an early onset of that iconic nostalgia) weep openly in class. I wasn't sure I liked everything in Carroll's collection, but I was thrilled to know it existed, that there were young American poets out there doing strange and wonderful things with words.
Grace Bauer: "Baby Boomer Issue(s)", Prairie Schooner, Summer 2009
Stones (cover by Joe Brainard): Tom Clark, 1969
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