Poetic gamboling

Back again. It's been a bit of drag with no Flagstaff trips to write about, but school has started and I've had two weeks of new poetry classes to keep me busy. One is a 200-level class at a community college, only 9 or 10 students, mostly young and mostly male. It's very odd to have a mostly male poetry class! It's almost always the other way around. We've divided into two groups for work-shopping our poems (instructor prowls around listening instead of participating in the feedback). In my group are three young males, one a bit older, and me. Two of the youngsters are hispanic, and are dreamy-eyed romantics. The third is blond and very shy. The older guy gives the best feedback. So, here I come with my second poem, first line "Her labia," and heads fly back.

I don't do this with malice or for shock value. Really. Sexual issues bother me, have bothered me most of my life, and so that's just naturally what I write a lot about. We had to write an extended metaphor poem, something standing in for something else. The labia were gates, and the rest of the poem tried to see them through the eyes of a man working out how to get in there and risking failure and humiliation. There are passwords and padlocks and pathways without signposts, yadda-yadda, the whole dilemma. I stared at my big toe for a while and got no ideas at all, but as soon as I thought of labia, bingo! I had a metaphor!

The instructor seems to be a bit timid, so I don't know what to expect from her re my metaphor. We get written comments on our poems next week. In the ASU class, 400-level, we all sit in a big circle, 20 of us and the instructor (as we did in the 200- and 300-level workshops). The interaction is busy and fruitful, the instructor participating in a way that helps produce productive feedback. I like this much better. My first poem -- a tale comparing chilly collapsed male genitalia to a novelty cow pie and going on to describe some of the pitfalls of senior sex -- was received with a few blushes and general hilarity and appreciation. The instructor wrote "bawdy and wonderful" on it. (Grin!)