dr_mabeuse
seduce the mind
- Joined
- Oct 10, 2002
- Posts
- 11,528
The Green Mill's the oldest bar in continuous operation the city of Chicago. Been going without cease since the 20's, since before prohibition, on the corner of Broadway and Lawrence, it was owned by Capone (his booth is still there, as well as the secret passage that leads down under Broadway in case of police raids). It still has the green velvet banquets, the wood panelling and cherrywood bar, faux Grecian nudes now yellowed with age, garish red and green lights, back room with bandstand for dancing and big bands, juke box with Monk and Charlie Barnett on 45's.
On Sunday night they open the mike to poets - the famous Green Mill Poetry Slams - and I've been remiss. I haven't gone until now. I've just been waking up to the oral poetry scene here and this has been going on for years. Recently I was alerted to an event in which poets and writers were reading sexual passage from their works but I couldn't go because I was doing some other dumb thing. I went to the slam at the Mill though and was disappointed to hear not one Erotic poet. Nothing about love or sex or anything sensual or magical. It was all political or stand-up comedy in free verse.
I've been having delusions of grandeur lately. We all know by now that half of all the fiction sold in the USA is romance and that the fastest - explosively fastest - growing segment of the romance market is romantica - sexually explicit romance. No one has to point out the absolute saturation of sex in this culture, and yet the cultural tools and mechanisms, the vocabulary and mythic structure for dealing with these things is nonexistent. Bombarded with these images of sex and sexuality, all we can do is masturbate. We're helpless to do anything else with them. We lack the mythic tools and erotic technology, the language, a way of thinking about them or dealing with them - the kinds of things our writers and poets should be providing us with.
As the world spins more and more out of control politically and technologically, we seem to keep throwing off these bizarre and distorted erotic images at an increasing rate, as if trying to compensate for our own insanity, like monkeys masturbating in a zoo, and yet there's no one there to tell us what they mean or what we're doing. At the Green Mill, I heard poet after poet go up there and talk about the war in Iraq and Corporate Culture and the despoiling of the earth and God knows it has to be said, but looking around at the people there, I couldn't help but notice how hungry they were to hear about their lover's bodies out floating over the Lake, or the touch of skin on skin in bed at night, or the truths from which all other truths flow, which are tactile, perceptual, sensual, and emotional, and I think the next time I have a chance to go back there and talk about fucking, I'm going to go. The world needs us.
On Sunday night they open the mike to poets - the famous Green Mill Poetry Slams - and I've been remiss. I haven't gone until now. I've just been waking up to the oral poetry scene here and this has been going on for years. Recently I was alerted to an event in which poets and writers were reading sexual passage from their works but I couldn't go because I was doing some other dumb thing. I went to the slam at the Mill though and was disappointed to hear not one Erotic poet. Nothing about love or sex or anything sensual or magical. It was all political or stand-up comedy in free verse.
I've been having delusions of grandeur lately. We all know by now that half of all the fiction sold in the USA is romance and that the fastest - explosively fastest - growing segment of the romance market is romantica - sexually explicit romance. No one has to point out the absolute saturation of sex in this culture, and yet the cultural tools and mechanisms, the vocabulary and mythic structure for dealing with these things is nonexistent. Bombarded with these images of sex and sexuality, all we can do is masturbate. We're helpless to do anything else with them. We lack the mythic tools and erotic technology, the language, a way of thinking about them or dealing with them - the kinds of things our writers and poets should be providing us with.
As the world spins more and more out of control politically and technologically, we seem to keep throwing off these bizarre and distorted erotic images at an increasing rate, as if trying to compensate for our own insanity, like monkeys masturbating in a zoo, and yet there's no one there to tell us what they mean or what we're doing. At the Green Mill, I heard poet after poet go up there and talk about the war in Iraq and Corporate Culture and the despoiling of the earth and God knows it has to be said, but looking around at the people there, I couldn't help but notice how hungry they were to hear about their lover's bodies out floating over the Lake, or the touch of skin on skin in bed at night, or the truths from which all other truths flow, which are tactile, perceptual, sensual, and emotional, and I think the next time I have a chance to go back there and talk about fucking, I'm going to go. The world needs us.
