Commentary on "Bonobo"

TIM SEIBLES

Usually, by the time I begin to write a poem, I have been wrestling with the poem's issues for a long while, sometimes months, sometimes years. It often starts with what feels like a suspicion. It seems that I begin to suspect that I've missed or forgotten something, maybe some important thing. Gradually, the suspicion takes on the presence of an itch--a mosquito bite on the brain--that becomes more and more prominent until, if I don't do something to scratch it, I start to come unwound inside. A swarm of some kind starts to occupy my head . . .
     "Bonobo" surged from just such a sensation. Throughout my writing life I have been fascinated with the sexual world, the crucible of the erotic--not exclusively but intensely. It strikes me that there is a vast world of possible pleasures that has been nearly smothered under a grim pall, the most prominent feature of which is silence, a fidgety, giggly, uncomfortably apologetic silence. Over the years I have come to believe this pall, this silence is a type of blight upon the American psyche, warping our sense of what is indecent and what is beautiful. Why do parents commonly feel honorable in showing a child a war memorial--an acknowledgment of human atrocity-while taking great pains to save their offspring from almost any explicitly sexual image or idea? If war destroys life and sex creates it, which is obscene? Would a world awash with erotic sensibility be more terrifying than our current one that reflects a general fascination with firepower and the respect commanded by those who wield the biggest sticks?
     Historically, The Church has been most gleefully complicit in promoting this particular blight, but without our general consent this confusion could not persist and pervade our lives the way it has. If a teacher discusses the horrors of the guillotine nobody blinks, but if the same teacher speaks frankly about the discovery and delights of cunnilingus parents storm the school. Why? Who made kill an acceptable word and fuck the bad one? What kinds of films are rated X and which are rated R? Bit by bit, I have found myself overwhelmed by the suspicion that some terrible lie is being seconded over and over and over.
     I first discovered poetry-real, serious, grown-up contemporary voices-in college at the age of nineteen, and what enchanted me initially was the sense of things being spoken that came from the uncolonized places in the mind and heart. Poems didn't have to be polite. They didn't have to be coy. They didn't avoid those dimensions of experience that are utterly felt but for which there are no exact words, nor did the good poems retreat into abstraction when the mysterious elbowed its way to the front of the line. It struck me that with poetry words could do what they were born to do, speak blood, bone, and soul in the rawest, most honest and electric way. In a poem a sentence could be as true as a guitar solo, only more exacting because a word is both sound and idea. At nineteen, as a kind of manic idealist, I thought important things might yet be said, and even though I wasn't quite sure what those things could be, I felt sure that poems would be worthy vehicles for them.
     Bonobo apes-to the best of my knowledge-live in communities informed almost utterly by the sexual impulse. They know nearly nothing of aggression and there are no records of one Bonobo dying at the hands of another. So, the poem "Bonobo" was an attempt to rattle the cage, a gesture toward revolt, a call to abandon any vision of human life that doesn't embrace the sexual universe, to seek the kind of gleeful social arrangement embodied in the bonobic world view. The poem actually begins with a kind of roll call directed to those who might participate in the rebellion, to those who might be willing to listen to this town crier of the erotic. And, though much of the rant is intended in dead earnest, the poem is playing too--tickling and punching--with regard to what is wished for and what is being fought against. The speaker is clearly dismissive of The Church and the zombified culture of shopaholism, but he is also slightly self-conscious about his own ministry, the unreachably utopian vision he is offering. It strikes me, however, that this is, at least, some part of the nature of poetry, of one individual's efforts to tell it like it is, to say the blackest, brightest thing that has taken possession of his/her skull. The whisper beneath most every poem is Attention! It could just be me chattering, but it is possible that something useful is being said here.