Fist Search

I’ve enjoyed this Smell which appeared on the occasionally excellent Spelk. Which is one of the places I thought I remembered reading a poem by a poet who wrote about violent sexual practice, bdsm, and powerplay. The poem explored it in a clever, concealed way — in a way that reminds me of that Neutral Milk Hotel song Communist Daughter.

Which means, if you run a slightly out-there poetry blog/magazine — you’ve probably seen in your search analytics someone searching for the word “fist” on your website. That was probably me, in my search for these poems.

The thing with poetry, and these poems in particular, is that I might not even be identifying the right keyword to be searching. Sure, one of the poems of three was definitely about fisting, but did it ever say the word “fist”? You’ll never find a poem again online unless you archive it somehow — but how do you know you want it until it haunts you weeks later?

As we’re on smut, I’ll share a poem you probably remember seeing somewhere: Keats is Dead so Fuck me From Behind by Hera Lindsay Bird.

All of these things blend sexuality with a kind of grief, sense of death, and so on. Lay back and think of brexit etc.

In the dark ages, when I was still at university, my dissertation was “A Sense Of Loss In The Pisan Cantos” (by our bestie Ezra Pound). Here he spent many lines bashed out in the DTC in Pisa lamenting the death of fascism in Italy — which is a morally interesting because as someone picking apart those feeling, you soon find that they are legitimate. You can grieve for the death of a concept, even if it’s functionally evil, and as a student pulling apart the lines, you can’t help but share a little of the sadness. Not because it’s something you’d liked to have kept alive, but because you can feel a man’s sadness as true.