Thomas Thurston: This review was originally published in White Crane Journal (#34). It is reprinted with permission from www.whitecranejournal.com online.
The signs may be a shoe, a black lace bra, latex, tatoos, jockstraps. The signs do not merely point to the flesh but take on a vitality of their own, as Gerald Locklin pleads to his lover:
sex is all in the skull, and i am not done conceptualizing.“Software,” the next section, goes from the sign to the flesh itself, along with its secretions, excretions and metaphors. The most popular metaphors of the flesh are edible plums, grapes, various berries. Emily Dickinson prefers the apricot. “Games We Play,” sends us into fantasies: domination, masochism, fantasies of past wounds, even fantasies evoking transcendence. Simon Sheppard tells of a leather daddy poet who torments his boy with Coleridge and Pound, leaving him despondent to wander through sleazy writing workshops, showing that ”(t)he muse is a hardmaster.”
“Hardware,” treats motorcycles and ultimate questions. Kirby Congdon explains that bikers race toward death…
to replace that dull, dull death that waits upon the rest of us behind a desk, behind another desk, behind the coffin lid closing like an office door.Others, like Edgar Allen Poe, court death in a more literal fashion.
Lest there be a taboo unturned, “Family and Pets” addresses the damaging and nurturing desires within the family circle. The longest poem in the collection tells the devastation of a youth who falls in love with his younger brother. Then Dillard reaches beyond the species to explorations of sexuality of and with cats, dogs, horses, birds, octopuses, starfish, bitches in season and beasts in rut. Flesh is in the beginning. As kink, the poems in this collection exult in the flesh. Flesh is arguably the starting point for our awareness of our identity as gay men. However, a reader must ask whether this focus on the flesh necessarily reveals something of the spirit. Some writers in this journal have contended that a profound sexual experience is of itself spiritual, since it impels one beyond ordinary experience. On the contrary, kink can be for its own sake; good sex can still be just sex. Sex without profundity can still make good poems. The reader will miss the joy in many of the poems by trying to make them more than what they are. Few of the poets make any claim to spiritual leadership, but among those who do is Allistar Crowley. However, his poems seek to shock and disgust, breaking all conventions save those of rhyme and meter. Is degrading the spirit a spiritual act?
Poems of kink step toward the spiritual when they lift the veil of myth that covers our sexuality. The politically correct of the gay community are quick to announce the goodness of gay sex. Such a prepackaged conclusion can reduce gay sexuality, even leather sex, to the niceness of a Hallmark card. The poets, however, put truth before politics. Thus they lay bare the pain we dare not speak. One of Dillard's poems confesses… I don't cry anymore when he hits me It only makes him stop. The poets tell not only how we heal ourselves through our fantasies, but also how we use fantasies to perpetuate our brokenness. Such a revelation is as crucial to growth as the discovery that my childhood church was crushing my soul. The alleged succor of spiritual growth may actually be the stumbling block. Only poets and prophets venture such words. Just as the leather or manacles are metaphors for sex, so sex is a metaphor for the divine. The distinction between sexual experience and religious experience can blur. Belinda Subraman tells of the orgasmic experience of speaking in tongues and getting off on Jesus. Robert Rucker speculates on the masochistic fantasies driving Jesus to the cross. Elissa Wald tells of passion storming the gates of the spirit: I'm in the throes Of a racking desire. Behold me and see A cynic all a-tremble, as before revelation, An atheist in religious ecstasy. A more common testament to the relation between torture, sex and religious sentiment not addressed by these poets stands behind the altar of almost any Roman Catholic church. Jesus, virtually nude, hangs from the cross in exquisite pain, with a body befitting a Colt model. The collection poses a final question for those who wish to explore gay spirituality. The poems are frequently but by no means exclusively gay. However, both in concept and accomplishment of the poem, sexual orientation hardly matters. Master or slave matters. Leather or lace matters. But gay or straight can write about the same fetish, the same kink, in the same way. Kink, in the end, is what a person or a group classifies as beyond the norm. In Dillard's collection, sex with a relative, a corpse, a pair of jeans or a household pet is kinky. To this gay anthologist, gay sex is not in itself kinky. Distinctively gay spirituality may have more to do with how we love and how we develop the courage to love than how we have sex. The collection as a whole is of consistent high quality. Poets of the stature of Lord Byron, D. H. Lawrence and Walt Whitman stand along some stunning contemporary poets. Dillard's own poems, with images as sharp and clear as the sting of a whip, are among the collection's best. Sadly, the collection lacks an index, either of poets, titles or first lines. The biographies are varyingly terse, obscure, precise or whimsical, but not to be overlooked.commenting closed for this article