Saint Strawberry

“Why are these examples all poetry?” I asked in the early margins of Adam Phillips’s Unforbidden Pleasures.

Here’s an example of a pleasure we’re all allowed: reading Brandon Brown, who quotes John Keats’s 1819 letter to his family about pleasure, in his epigraph to “Autumn” in The Four Seasons:

Talking of Pleasure, this moment I was writing with one hand, and with the other holding to my Mouth a Nectarine — good God how fine. It went down soft, pulpy, slushy, oozy — all its delicious embonpoint melted down my throat like a large beatified Strawberry.

Writing a book about the seasons is an unforbidden pleasure, as is memorizing “To Autumn,” which Brown’s third season poem starts out trying and failing to do, as is the sound of bleating hilly lambs. The first “forbidden” pleasure in Brown’s “Autumn” does come early, though; he wears white after Labor Day, and Bob Glück encourages this trespass.

I try to avoid judging others for not sharing my pleasures. While I may think less of someone who actively likes something I find terrible—say, Ezra Pound—I rarely feel this way about the inverse, someone not liking something I love. It just means all the more pizza for me, etc.

The exceptions are when the lack of pleasure signals a corresponding lack of character. Should anyone tell me they don’t like Brown’s work, for example, I would think they were so embarrassed by being pleased they had taught themselves to pretend to be above it. This is an unforgivable quality, not only because I am actively working to foster my intolerance of people who prefer explanation to enjoyment.

I trust you less if you don’t enjoy The Four Seasons, which is to say that I have accidentally forbid something, already. It is very hard, it turns out, to enjoy outside of limits or rules.  

Gossip being among my favorite pleasures, I’d like to tell you that a friend told me that Bernadette Mayer told her that one could meet an audience’s need for academic rigor by throwing in the word “fractal.” If you’d like to learn to please the critics, rather than to fuck them.   

Phillips, near my initial marginalia, is in the middle of an argument about why we rely on “obedience” as the framework for enjoyment, wondering what pleasures we ignore with our—and with psychoanalysis’s—obsession with the breaking and following of rules. Rather than draw on his clinical experience, he says, look, this poet (Eduardo C. Corral) says so. We have to be hungry to get what we need.

Why, for a psychoanalyst, would a poem be the best evidence “that something we might be unwilling to describe as ‘obedience’ may even be the precondition for our survival . . .” (48-9)? It should be easier to imagine a case study, an historical document, a failed revolution, etc. offering a more convincing example of our too-great respect for the law. In a damning review in the London Review of Books, Anthony Cummins ends with the claim that “Unforbidden Pleasures embodies its own counter-argument to its doubts about the value of discipline;” in preferring poets, theories of secular morality, and digression to contribution to the field of psychoanalysis, he thinks Phillips does little more than suggest we reconsider our pleasures. Cummins sees, for example, Phillips’s recounting of the way Freud’s childhood reading of Don Quixote shaped his later theories as a “flashy” show of erudition. A more generous reader might interpret Phillips as recommending we actively cultivate certain pleasures (like reading novels or poetry) above others.

It is not news that psychoanalysis is preoccupied with art. Literary critics tend to interpret this phenomenon backwards, assuming it means we can use psychoanalysis to understand literature—either its characters or its writers—even though Freud (and Phillips, for that matter) seemed much more interested in a flipped version of that order of instruction. And not because poetry offers guidance for how lives should be lived; Rilke’s “Archaic Torso of Apollo” is not a substitute for therapy, either in itself (as a poem to convince you to change your life) or in its narrative account (as a story about the experience of art demanding a viewer consider such a change). Psychoanalysts turn to poetry both because it remains a mild disciplinary mystery—Freud never sorted out how sublimation works—and because the way we interact with poems, as pleasurable things that invite overthinking without hope of mastery, might be instructive for other, higher-stakes interactions.

Say, a poem asks you to think about flossing your teeth.

It doesn’t just say, “maybe it’s nice to floss them.”

It also reminds you that “Eileen Myles has a line like ‘when I stopped drinking I started having really good dental hygiene.’” You get to imagine, at once, getting old enough to care about your teeth, remembering reading things you cared about, and knowing that to write a poem is to get to combine things you cared about. Myles says, “What being sober comes to mean is days and days of life, doing all sorts of tedious things that no upstanding addict ever wanted to live to do—flossing, for instance,” and goes on to describe their commitment to “having teeth for the rest of my life.” To have teeth, and to write about them, and to, as the speaker of Brown’s poem does, floss your teeth with little sticks at work to the point of bleeding, readjusting your tie behind your back such that it’s “flopping . . . like a hummingbird’s tongue,” is to open yourself up to connecting tooth flossing to willingness to go on living, to the unlikeliness of life preceding in a world that makes disposable plastic flossing devices, to the weirdness of hummingbirds’ tongues (14)—a minor miracle of the daily pleasure associative thought affords.

I read Unforbidden Pleasures on my therapist’s recommendation, without looking up Phillips first. So when I wrote that marginal question, I did not know that every interviewer asks him some form of it—the answer is “the reading of poetry would be a very good training for a psychoanalyst”—and I did not remember that I had read his introduction to H.D.’s Tribute to Freud, a book that made me very jealous of her analysis (which I wrote about here: “Freud’s accomplishment is to learn, from God, how to explain H.D.’s desire for women.”) Phillips describes H.D.’s Freud as himself “an unorthodox Freudian,” because he loans her books, gossips, socializes. I’d guessed that my therapist recommended Phillips to me not for the book’s suggestion that reading poetry might guide me to a better relationship to pleasure—if that were true, I’d have been sorted out some time ago—but because of his damning profile of the superego:

There are only ever two or three things we endlessly accuse ourselves of, and they are all too familiar . . . Were we to meet [the superego] socially, as it were, this accusatory character, this internal critic, we would think there was something wrong with him. He would just be boring and cruel. We might think that something terrible had happened to him. That he was living in the aftermath, in the fallout of some catastrophe. And we would be right. (89)

This self-critic is not just stupid, repetitive, and cruel, though; she’s also pleased with herself. Self-criticism is among Phillips core examples of an unforbidden pleasure, suggesting that permissibility is insufficient grounds for finding more satisfying kinds of enjoyment.

Brown’s The Four Seasons enjoys being self-critical about the impulse to pretention. Though the speaker’s friends, “the autumn after high school,” are all smart enough to get drunk for drunkenness’s sake, he admits that his childhood benders were “spiritual exercises strengthening my claim to artistic greatness” (51). That the pleasure of drinking is lost in the aspirational pleasure to drink artistically, which is regained in the reflection on this folly.

For Phillips, self-criticism is a fraught pleasure, one we are permitted even if we don’t enjoy very much. Holly Melgard has been writing a book of poetry from the perspective of her inner critic for some time, and I wish it had been published in full already so I could write, here, about more than the brief excerpt that appeared in Convolution. Here’s a bit from the preface:

Ignore your inner critic. Fuck that. Nobody likes to feel ignored. Critics are people too. Just because they’re critics doesn’t mean they don’t deserve to be heard just like anybody. Tune out your inner critic.—For all the writing out there that exists on inner criticism, most of it either describes it or instructs how to ignore it. Hardly any of it actually documents what inner critics say. The following are excerpts from a book I’m making, “Inner Critic: A Journal of Inner Criticism.” Because I for one want to listen to what our inner critics have to say. Plus, I need a critical publication line on my CV. (34)

Melgard’s inner critic starts by telling her what’s wrong with this preface—it’s “too biographically specific,” even though “you’re not special . . . You know psychologists have already mapped this, right? So why keep going? It’s commonplace really.” It focuses on how what she’s doing has already been done before, how self-reflexivity and perpetual negation is either passé or too-contemporary. And as the inner critic goes on, it gets especially mean about the fear of going unread: “Oh quit exaggerating. Someone’s reading this. Right? See, you are. Don’t be so mellow dramatic [sic]. Be nicer. I’m not that bad.” (37) It doesn’t just repeat itself; it also accuses its author of repetition. But despite this character’s badness, its reliance on the laziest critical anxiety (Melgard’s inner critic warns her, among other things, that hashtag activists will come after her), it gets transformed from the true selfishness of self-directed judgment into a character, one from which its writer is sufficiently freed to invite interruption. She ends by inviting contributions to the project: “If you or someone you know lives with an ignored inner critic, even if you don’t want to listen, I do.”

When I asked the internet if it could think of any poems/books that are about “unforbidden pleasures,” I was not surprised that everyone recommended Frank O’Hara, a great writer about love and cities and the pleasure of writing down proper nouns. O’Hara writes, too, about life itself offering pleasures greater than writing (“what good does all the research of the Impressionists do them /when they never got the right person to stand near the tree when the sun sank”), and about remembering those pleasures by telling someone else about them. But it would be difficult to frame these (gay) pleasures as “unforbidden”:

That’s okay. Happiness is a fucking dull aspiration at best; if we go looking for poetry that shows uncomplicated pleasure, we’ll find some rich person waxing psyched about their beach vacation. A familiar longing: I want not the unforbidden pleasures of the dog—who enjoys, like people do, obedience—but of the cat, who learns nothing from punishment but rage. Poetry, too, is a dull aspiration. If we take Phillips’ thinking to far, we might risk believing it offers redemption. 

Phillips writes that Oscar Wilde implies that “we are taught to remember everything except our pleasures,” but I don’t think his interest in poetry is about this mnemonic respect. When he talks about analogies between therapy and poetry, for example, he focuses on shared formal constraints, comparing the 50 minutes of the session to the 14 lines of a sonnet. Sometimes, he presents such limits as a good thing, but at others they are, well, limiting: “We want to narrow our minds—we want to speak and write in particular way—because we want to set limits to our wanting, to our sense of possibility.”

Poetry should probably get over its fixation on limits, which results in the dullest kind of sectarianism. Somewhere, right now, an Assistant Professor of Creative Writing is struggling to explain to his students why poetry does not need to rhyme or be metrical, only to offer some equally arbitrary guidelines that map onto whatever has most hurt his feelings in the years of writing that got him into that room. It’s important to subvert a reader’s expectations, he might say, or a writer should focus on her work, not on the reading’s after-party, or abstractions should be rendered concrete, or poetry should be distinguishable from prose, or sentimentality is dead, or there should be an epiphany or an experiment, or form should be internally consistent, etc.

Some poems are about a desire to go beyond those limits, especially the imagined constraints on our real life pleasures. But when Phillips says, “I hardly ever came across an analyst, when I was training, who made me feel that they really loved sex,” I remember all the poems I’ve read lately by young-ish writers who seem to want to say, “look at the bold sex I have had,” poems that make me never want to take off my clothes again. They are hardly ever sexy, let alone good poems. Either the pleasure is located in the sheer liberating feeling of breaking an implied rule, or in admitting how bad the sex is—the genre of “my Tinder dates have led me to reconsider whether sex-negative feminism may have been right after all”—or in youthfulness itself—“remember when you, too, could do coke without spiraling into depression?”—or in generic irrelevance—“so what if I wrote a messier version of a Sex Diary column in The Cut?”

When poems do seem to be about good sex, they accept that it is rather ordinary. When Bernadette Mayer writes lines like “you come inside me sideways as always” and “also, you don’t want to have a baby,” she does not frame pleasure as forbidden, but as something one fits in around chores. Which is why, I think, the New York School is good at documenting pleasure; Kay Gabriel replied to me that Ted Berrigan’s “’things to do’ poems [are] . . . related to this tendency to the degree that they’re all joyously bound to totally banal social situations.”

The reading and writing of poetry is insufferable, sure, and I struggle to make an argument for it. Phillips makes some arguments for why analysts should bother, but I’m just a patient, so the claims do little to justify my preoccupation. But I still think—despite myself, and with great reserve—that there is something particular (for reasons economic, social, geographic, even libidinal) about poetry’s ability to document pleasures like songs or kisses or anger or saying no, etc., without needing to pretend that doing so was very important, or very bad in its unimportance, or very useful in showing us a path to unimportance’s humility, etc.

My friend (friendship being unforbidden) Shiv Kotecha (whose “Obedience Residency Manual” is a good example of desiring around self-imposed rules) commented somewhere in this draft:

um girl give me examples of how poetry conjures real life pleasure. maybe end your essay without poetry, sandwiched with poetry experiences, but without poetry [ . . . ]

We were gossiping about dating; I was describing post-coital tears. He drafted a paragraph, as if it were by me, about giving up the unforbidden pleasure that is sex with men, and about poetry being chill because it acknowledges life outside of it. But I didn’t want to write about individual pleasures, but collective ones, which is why I had started out thinking about Brown’s work; without realizing it, I was thinking about Marie Buck’s essay on the “lyric moment” at the end of Brown’s “For My Future Children,” where he writes a poem to his friend’s children that imagines them living in whatever world survives us, detailing, like a pleased uncle or godfather or ghost, the specific enjoyments that may not remain accessible to them. Buck, among other things I wish I had written in this essay, admits that she isn’t “particularly tolerant of poetry about how profound the little enjoyments of life,” but that Brown succeeds at “refram[ing them] within the social and political world.” I’m pleased to agree.

I didn’t want to write about analysis, a subject I gave up on some years ago. Though few of the arguments I tried to make in grad school matter to me now, I am still sad about some essayistic failures: one on the ethics of sublimation, which seems deeply individual (“how did she write a poem rather than having a panic attack?”) but can only happen in relationship to socially-recognized form (“how did she write a poem that breaks from the period style it still legibly participates in?”); one attempt to figure out whether analysis happens in poetry or in prose (I had a panic attack giving said paper, and read it at 300+ words per minute, about twice the rate of regular speech, before whiting out and ending the talk early); one “exploration” of “style” in relation to perversion; etc. Rather, I was reading Unforbidden Pleasures, and I was struck in the way I am sometimes struck reading poetry: that it is rare and difficult and almost embarrassing when someone tries to describe a pleasure without making a simultaneous confession of guilt, or acceptance of pain, or invocation of novelty. Last week, I asked my therapist if I was right, that she’d told me to read Phillips to learn about the stupidity of the superego. Of course, because therapists are not our friends, she refused to answer, and wanted me to explain why I thought she had suggested it. Fine. In the end, she succumbed: “Don’t you suffer around your pleasures?”

The best thing that has happened to poetry in the last decade, I think, is that poets became less beholden to that impulse to “set limits to our wanting.” This setting aside has to happen first outside of poetry—that line from di Prima’s “Revolutionary Letter #19,” “you can have what you ask for, ask for / everything”—but once you start asking, you don’t stop. You ask for more from your lovers, maybe. You ask for an end to capitalism, say, in one way or another. You ask for less from work, which is to say, you ask yourself for more than a life of working. Eventually, if poetry is something you ask anything of, you’ll have to ask more from it too. 

Say, for example, that you were once learning to write poetry, and you had some teachers and writers whose work meant the world to you—it introduced you to questions about writing you hadn’t asked before, or it made light of things you had been sad not to understand, but now could just join in mocking. You learn, as you grow up, not just that some of these teachers and writers were bad people, but that the things they valued in writing, the very things that taught you how to write, were products of that badness. You might be tempted to hold onto this love, these writers, or these teachers. But since you no longer find yourself in a position to accept what’s been given, you instead decide to change, and you quit resembling the person who could be happy to learn from them. This means that, suddenly, you are less of a prick! You read more widely, and you feel pity, rather than admiration, for people who believe their work is radical, and you care more about whether these poets are decent than whether they are good craftsmen or provocateurs. You realize that it is as stupid to feel guilty for not working on your poems as it is stupid to feel ashamed if they are too focused on the first-person, or too traditional, or too formless, or too prosaic. Instead, poetry becomes one of the many ways you have of asking for things, and for being pleased by the asking.