Poetry | Arnold Zwicky's Blog

Archive for the ‘Poetry’ Category

Fleurs des males

January 27, 2021

Penises as literally the flowers of manhood, which can be collected into bouquets and other floral arrangements — an occasional theme in artworks that are light-hearted and charming rather than pornographic, intended to amuse rather than to arouse.

The occasion for this posting was a Facebook posting by Greg Parkinson yesterday about a 1982 exhibition “Extended Sensibilities: Homosexual Presence in Contemporary Art” (an early exploration — almost 50 years ago — of the topic), which included one of these artworks:

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Posted in Art, Gender and sexuality, Names, Phallicity, Poetry, Titles, Trade names | Leave a Comment »

Hot wings on a paper plate

July 12, 2020

In my comics feed for the day, this One Big Happy from 6/15, featuring a Dad Tall Tale, DTT for short (here an elaborate poetic burlesque):

(#1)

The original: Joyce Kilmer’s famous (and famously sentimental) poem “Trees” — also famously parodied, most notably in Ogden Nash’s “Song of the Open Road”.

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Posted in Linguistics in the comics, Masculinity, Parody, Poetic form, Poetry, Pop culture | Leave a Comment »

Aradesque?

June 1, 2020

(Men’s bodies and mansex in plain language, so not for kids or the sexually modest. This is a guest column by my sexy alter ego Alex Adams.)

A prequel to AZ’s Pentecost Sunday (5/31) posting “The death of images”, in which “My tv has died” called up Frank O’Hara’s poem “Lana Turner has collapsed!”, and he folded those two things into a poem of his own, with bodybuilder, gay pornstar, and underwear model Arad Winwin as some glue to hold it all together.

But, you ask (quite reasonably), of all the hot musclehunk tops in the whole gay porn world, how did Arnold come to select this particular one, Arad? Arnold had, after all, been being serviced with deep satisfaction by others of Arad’s carnal brotherhood, with Arad barely on his horizon — but then, whoa!, Arad popped up in a 5/25 Daily Jocks cock-tease ad for a Pump! underwear sale, and refreshed our memory and our desire. So we took him in.

The guy was undeniably really hot. But was he actually Arad, or merely some Aradesque look-alike?

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Posted in Art, Homosexuality, Language and the body, Poetry, Underwear | 2 Comments »

The death of images

May 31, 2020

(Lots about men’s bodies and mansex, in very plain language. Not for kids or the sexually modest.)

Poetry inspired by a recent event in my life and by one of my favorite Frank O’Hara poems, “Lana Turner has collapsed!”. That will lead ineluctably to the Persian-born bodybuilder, underwear model, and gay pornstar Arad Winwin. Everything below the fold.

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Posted in Gay porn, Gender and sexuality, Movies and tv, Music, Poetry, Underwear | Leave a Comment »

The Age of Anxiety

May 22, 2020

That was January and February and it was unpleasant. Then things got really bad (last day out of the house on 3/8, then two brushes with death, but that’s not my topic here).

So: the Auden poem; FPNs (faggot persecution nightmares), one set off by Torch Song Trilogy; and the astonishing devastation of Beethoven’s “Rage Over a Lost Penny”.

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Posted in Books, Homosexuality, Movies and tv, Music, My life, Poetry | Leave a Comment »

The things they touched

May 18, 2020

The centerpiece of this posting is a poem by Conrad Aiken, “Music I Heard”, about the loss of someone much loved, and about the way the things that they touched and used can continue to resonate with you after they are gone. I was reminded of this poem by Mark Seiden (in Facebook), who heard echoes of it in my recent Facebook postings about the things that were touched and used by my two dead partners (Ann Daingerfield (Zwicky), gone in 1985; Jacques Henry Transue, gone in 2003), especially their clothing, especially through the scents of their bodies as carried by this clothing.

Mark’s FB note pointed not just to the Aiken poem, but to an especially moving setting of it by the composer Henry Cowell. The Cowell was new to me, though I was familiar with a (characteristically operatic) setting by Leonard Bernstein.

So, yes, this looks all high-artsy, with serious poetry and music all over it, but it’s also pretty much as deeply carnal as you can get, about bodies and their smells and tastes. Both of these things are important.

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Posted in Language and food, Language and the body, Movies and tv, Music, My life, Poetry | 4 Comments »

Martin Van Buren, feeding nachos to a hyperactive squirrel

April 10, 2020

Yesterday’s Zippy has Our Pinhead imagining empathetically identifying with Grover Cleveland, Gwyneth Paltrow, Frank Zappa, Martin Van Buren, … and a (particular) squirrel:

(#1) The title of the set piece in Zippy’s dream — “Martin Van Buren, Feeding Nachos to a Hyperactive Squirrel” — uses a familiar syntactic template for describing scenes

This is the world of “Washington Crossing the Delaware” and “Aristotle Contemplating a Bust of Homer”.

Meanwhile, Zippy engages in a mental exercise that has absorbed philosophers of consciousness for about 50 years, as distilled in the title of an influential paper by Thomas Nagel: “What Is It Like To Be a Bat?”

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Posted in Art, Language and animals, Linguistics in the comics, Nonsense, Philosophy, Poetry | 1 Comment »

Clouds of glory

April 4, 2020

On Facebook, Bob Richmond reported returning to his mother’s copy of Page’s British Poets of the Nineteenth Century, to muse on a favorite passage of hers from William Wordsworth’s “Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood”. In the passage he posted about on Facebook, this excerpt:

Not in entire forgetfulness
And not in utter nakedness
But trailing clouds of glory do we come
From God, who is our home

Ah, immediate clang for me: the Sacred Harp (1991 Denson revision), 480, Redemption (words and setting by John T. Hocutt, 1959), with the chorus:

Oh, His blood was shed that we might live
With Him when life is o’er,
And upon the clouds of glory ride
Safe to that peaceful shore.

I’ve long been moved by the idea of riding upon those clouds of glory, and now it seems that Wordsworth is the source of the phrase — here, and in other places as well.

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Posted in Language and politics, Music, Poetry, Quotations | 2 Comments »

Eel-eater and his kind

February 24, 2020

From Facebook friends, hot herpetological news. From Reptiles magazine, the story “Rainbow Snake Seen In Florida’s Ocala National Forest For First Time Since 1969” by John Virata on 2/20/20:

quoting from a Fish and Wildlife Research Institute posting from 2/19:

A Rare Sighting! Tracey Cauthen recently reported stumbling upon a ~4 ft Rainbow Snake, Farancia erytrogramma, while hiking in the Ocala National Forest.