At Full Stop: Poetry, IUDs, Copper Toxicity, Cixous, Conrad, the Song of the Sphinx...

Published this week at Full Stop, a new essay by Caren Beilin that covers birth control, language, gender, desire, toxicity, the poetry of CAConrad, and, to start, Jolen Crème Bleach as a "poor [women's] secret, a despicably shallow revelation." "These products are not our secrets." Later, Beilin remarks on another thing, the IUD. "I want to read a thing — the copper IUD called Paragard — against the hard song of the sphinx, and I am building, in the aftermath of my copper insanity, a new Paragard library." Let's continue:

The library includes the archival material of Paragard’s own pamphlets, quoted above, and online material designed for women, an article in Jezebel titled “How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love My IUD,” which celebrates, too, what copper isn’t, the hormones. What is it?

CAConrad writes about copper in one of his somatic poetry exercises, “Aphrodisios”:

Wash a penny, rinse it, slip it under your tongue, and walk out the door. Copper is the metal of Aphrodite, never ever forget this, never, don’t forget it, ever.

Copper, metal of the goddess of love, functions in the uterus as sperm killer. But like things, it does more. It mysteries. The somatic exercise changes registers; Conrad first asks his subject to meditate on love with copper in the mouth, but moves this penny to the top of her head, and changes the subject:

Be quiet while thinking about that Love. If someone comes along and starts talking, quietly shoo them away, you’re busy, you’re a poet with a penny in your mouth, idle chitchat is not your friend. Be quiet so quiet, let the very sounds of that Love be heard in your bones. After a little while take the penny out of your mouth and place it on the top of your head. Balance it there and sit still a little while, for you are now moving your own forces quietly about in your stillness. Now get your pen and paper and write about POVERTY, write line after line about starvation and deprivation from the voice of one who has been Loved in this world.

You attend to a thing by putting it in your mouth, and on your head—to taste, to balance, to put your body in the path of its force. You put your love, its great force, into the path of Poverty.

I began to read the new copper in my body, while the IUD was still in it. It could be read. I had become upset by something with my partner. It was something quite subtle — an affect, a line of discourse at a dinner party — and as I unpacked my upset, the upset kept growing worse, and strange. Its language — a few sentences — gummed my entire mind and I thought them, and said them, thought and said them, again and again, for hours, in the shower, in bed, in creepy whispers, out loud on an interminable wheel to my sister, these sentences — two, three — indissoluble, my mind was entirely made from them, and my heart was highly palpitating, and I felt anger and paranoia and depression and produced a new sentence, “I will punish him,” and with an oncoming migraine, and no affect, my nephew a mere jug, I decided — another new sentence! at least! — “I will kill myself.”

I typed into my computer “IUD copper and depression,” and it flooded with message boards and support groups full of thousands of women. An article titled “In Online Forums, Women Share IUD Fears” predicts me:

Many [women] are drawn to online forums after they search for a possible relationship between ‘copper IUD’ and ‘depression.’ Theories about copper toxicity are the first to pop up with a simple search on the Internet.