Cunt Norton
by Dodie Bellamy
Les Figues Press, November 2013
75 pages / $15  Buy from Les Figues Press or SPD

In Cunt Norton, Bellamy slices the canonical texts, lifts the raw skin, and slides all kinds of exciting things into the wound. Then she sews it back up. The result is a bulging, infested boil of sex and gender. The result is dirty love poems secreting out the orifices of our favorite fathers. (And one mother: Dickinson.)

Playing off of William S. Burroughs’ “cut-up” technique, Bellamy published Cunt Ups in 2001. Now she’s back at it, “cu(n)ting” up the 1975 Norton Anthology of Poetry. She selected thirty-three poets from the anthology and has re-imagined their texts: cutting and interspersing their words with hypersexual language. Poets ranging from Shakespeare to Ashberry still sound remarkably like themselves. They are recognizable—only sloppy with desire. Dripping wet.

The multi-gendered speakers in Cunt Norton end up sounding at turns psychotic, absurd, and boring—which comes pretty close to the actuality of sexual encounters and the language we use for desire. When the speaker in “Cunt Auden” says, “You be a good girl—I’ll take care of you—lay here in my hands with their many fingers. I’ve never ever given anybody help who didn’t come” (57), I want to barf at the sad, true, cliché of it. I feel the same with “Cunt Yeats,” which begins: “Gloom is in my mind, and I have to fuck you so bad. Good girl. Good girl” (40). “Cunt Blake” finishes with a hearty, “I poke out and in thee in so many places, the Air shreds to Rags and the Heavens tear” (21) and “Cunt Tennyson” promises to “fuck thy portal until mouths, foreheads, eyelids lose all boundaries” (35), both of which are equally hilarious and scary. I am reminded of all my worst sexual experiences.

Other pieces are full of rollicking, gender-bending, free-for-alls. Take, for example, “Cunt Frost:” “My clit stands still and dances—it looks huge, the outer lips filling the abyss’ void with emptiness. It cries out for you. […] My cock is normal size, ready to throw back without regret into your cunt or your large intestine” (43). The Great Men from the Norton Anthology are marionettes in Bellamy’s hands. Their reputations are at her disposal: their genitalia grow and morph, their gigantic desires never satisfied.

But Bellamy’s book is as much a political act as it is a book of poetry.

Let me offer an example why. Recently, after I participated in a reading, a fellow (male) poet asked me why I write about the same thing (sex) all the time. And why do I use such vulgar (cock, cunt, etc.) language? He suggested that I would get more publications if I varied my subject matter and cleaned up my language a bit.

Dodie Bellamy’s Cunt Norton exists as an answer to these kinds of questions. What I mean is: Dodie Bellamy is a woman who writes about sex. Who writes with verve and risk and imagination. Who isn’t afraid of language, or of dead white men, or the reverence we are supposed to have for them. Dodie Bellamy will not be silenced or ashamed. When Ariana Reines writes in the book’s introduction that this “could be the most joyful book on Earth” and it “made me feel so good I laughed so hard I cried,” what she may be articulating is how powerful it feels to witness a woman writing exactly how she wants to write, refusing to be silenced (by the canon, the patriarchy, any other poet’s aesthetic or ethical impulse).

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AIRY BABY: AN EQUAL TO THE ATE NIPPLE?//I worry/I don’t/Believe in Books/or do owly///
by Debbie Hu
Perfect Lovers Press, 2013
Edition of 100 / $5  Buy from Perfect Lovers Press

Debbie Hu wants you to think about baby, but all I can think about is what baby means for poetry. Mac Low starts off his 17th dance with the realization/instruction, “Someone has a baby or seems to have one.” Yes, obviously, we are always having some kind of baby. Notley—to whom Hu gives a much necessary shout out—once questioned, “Do you think women & men have kids in order to become immortal?” Why baby and why now? Are we making baby or is baby making us?  Is it baby or the process of baby? Poets used to have babies now they have the Internet.  Poets today let their babies do unfathomable things and leave their tiny baby lives in shambles. Contemporary Poet Jennifer Pieroni’s baby is primarily unlucky. In “Unlucky Babies,” she locks her baby out of the car and does not even allow for it to learn to type. Contemporary Poet Chelsey Minnis puts her baby on secret trial: “A baby on 9/11 was definitely in love with me and the parents did not know.” Hu’s baby lives in a similar place. It is part voyeur, part chauffeur, and part Gucci waiting in the wings.  She writes:

Hu’s baby has been taught to type because Hu’s baby is sometimes herself. Most often, though, baby is more of a symbolic bystander than a conduit. Baby is not always the most important thing but this book seems to be baby’s own creation. Perhaps it would be best to say that Airy Baby, is a kind of intertextual baby book; for the gentle omnipresent-omniscient baby, there is Ke$ha. There is charming organizational risk AKA formal chaos. There is the political as it battles with the personal. There is Cantonese then New Zealand. There are penises or shame. The narrative voice is distinctly cohesive yet polyvocal in a very necessary way.

Hu switches between the hyper casual and the “large idea” casual. She goes from “I wore a candy stripe dress / To the General Assembly and my pleaseface until I / Become a pop star my pleaseface is a dontrapeme pleaseface becuz / stay away my cunt smells terrible” to “it wounds me to read that she craves solitude and no / accountability, I feel like I am all despicable money” in just one page. She is sometimes Gurlesque transgressive in a blunt way like Ariana Reines, but most often a very idealistic type of gross-delicate, something that makes me think of Jenny Zhang’s first collection. Feng Sun Chen, from whom Hu quotes extensively, also comes to mind.

While very much composing a “poetry” book, the pieces are sometimes epistolary fragments and other times stolen bits from the pages of some tangentially yet brilliantly related thing. Airy Baby has titled sections, but they’re largely irrelevant; demarcations and page numbers become nobody’s business. Pieces start and stop wherever they’d like—pick back up then quit again.  Baby, itself, operates similarly, waiting in the background for its opportunity to be the savior or the disgrace. To be the distraction. Baby is present for pages then not at all; it vanishes.

There are epiphanies laced throughout but, much like the emotional content of the book, these realizations are muted. The writing is laced with a certain sense of overwhelming comic unhappiness—the kind of thing that surfaces with any period of introspection. Hu jokingly alludes to David Foster Wallace in the book’s preface, and, like Wallace, uses footnotes to distract and “confuse” the reader. Here, though, it would seem that Hu employs these asides to soften the intensely emotional or personal. We are always returning to humor because humor is the only way to comprehend humanity.

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