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The Poetry of Everyday LifeStorytelling and the Art of Awareness$
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The Poetry of Everyday Life: Storytelling and the Art of Awareness

Steve Zeitlin

Print publication date: 2016

Print ISBN-13: 9781501702358

Published to Cornell Scholarship Online: May 2017

DOI: 10.7591/cornell/9781501702358.001.0001

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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
DOI:10.7591/cornell/9781501702358.003.0007

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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