- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
-
1 Kindred Spirits -
2 Intimacy in Language -
3 Laughter for Dessert -
4 The Poetry of Ping-Pong -
5 Days of Chess and Backgammon -
6 Inventing a Language for Love -
7 Poetry on the Porch -
8 All My Trials -
9 The AIDS Poets -
10 Oh Did You See the Ashes Come Thickly Falling Down? -
11 The POEMobile Dreams of Peace -
12 Free Market Flavor -
13 The Poetry in Science -
14 Navigating Transitions -
15 The Human Unit of Time -
16 Your Body as Symbol -
17 Intimations of Immortality -
18 God Is in the Details -
19 Breath on the Mirror -
20 The Best Stories versus My Story -
21 The Grease Lamp’s Flicker and Flare -
22 Lion’s Gate -
23 Rock and Word - For Further Reading
- Permissions
Inventing a Language for Love
Inventing a Language for Love
Sex as Poetry and Play
- Chapter:
- (p.69) 6 Inventing a Language for Love
- Source:
- The Poetry of Everyday Life
- Author(s):
Steve Zeitlin
- Publisher:
- Cornell University Press
This chapter describes sex as poetry and play. Our sexual experiences, the author suggests, must rise above the rote performances of “a bull in Wisconsin” if they are to play a significant part in our lives. Because sex is an animal urge but also a human endeavor, the author asks how we—how we can—infuse it with meaning. “We are alone in this world,” said Lissa, quoted in the writer and public radio producer Julia Hutton's book, Good Sex: Real Stories from Real People, “and we can't truly connect minds and hearts except through the tools we have—language, art, music, and sex.” No two people come to sex and sexuality the same way. The author talks about how we use language, story, poetry, and play to add aesthetics to sex; how we poeticize and humanize and create entire worlds of pleasure and angst based on the few ways that human beings can tuck ourselves into one another.
Keywords: sex, poetry, play, sexual experiences, sexuality, language, story, aesthetics, pleasure
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- Title Pages
- Dedication
- Epigraph
- Foreword
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
-
1 Kindred Spirits -
2 Intimacy in Language -
3 Laughter for Dessert -
4 The Poetry of Ping-Pong -
5 Days of Chess and Backgammon -
6 Inventing a Language for Love -
7 Poetry on the Porch -
8 All My Trials -
9 The AIDS Poets -
10 Oh Did You See the Ashes Come Thickly Falling Down? -
11 The POEMobile Dreams of Peace -
12 Free Market Flavor -
13 The Poetry in Science -
14 Navigating Transitions -
15 The Human Unit of Time -
16 Your Body as Symbol -
17 Intimations of Immortality -
18 God Is in the Details -
19 Breath on the Mirror -
20 The Best Stories versus My Story -
21 The Grease Lamp’s Flicker and Flare -
22 Lion’s Gate -
23 Rock and Word - For Further Reading
- Permissions