From Meretricious Kisses
by Ann Townsend

A connoisseur of kisses, Thomas Wyatt recognized a good kiss when he got one. He didn’t like to stop at just one kiss. The poem “They flee from Me” tells us that and records one of the sexiest kisses in English literature. What makes a poem feel real enough that we “fall for it,” read as if it happened, and in just this way? What compels a reader to make personal claims about this poem, this poet? The question should really be: What pulls us in? Even better: What makes such a poem erotic? The events in “They flee from Me” feel immediate despite their distance from us, despite how different Wyatt’s life a courtier in the service of King Henry VII was from ours. Eros is eros is eros, across he centuries, and anyone is susceptible to its power. That’s one answer. But to speak in a more nuanced way of poetry’s power to convince us, we should consider the body of the poem itself. There we would find that Wyatt conjures an ongoing drama, in rhythmically intense language; he enacts his recollections as if they were still in progress. The kisses he describes continue to haunt him; they are, in equal measure, full of pleasure and pain. Although he mourns their loss, he can’t forgive them, nor the woman whose mouth he kissed:

    When her loose gown from her shoulders did fall,
    And she me caught in her arms long and small;
Therewithal sweetly did me kiss,
And softly said, Dear heart, how like you this?

Oh, he likes it. And continues to hear her mocking voice even after the event itself has passed. But throughout the poem “all is turned,” and their intimacy dissolved into painful memory, rejection, “a strange fashion of forsaking,” and what remains are questions and no good answers. Good kisses, bad kisses, meretricious kisses: What are kisses for?
    Erotic poetry makes its own strategic use of the emotional tactics that lovers have always employed on each other. Poetry enacts a simultaneously frustrating and engaging dance of intimacy: hurry and delay; contact and distance; love and hate; pleasure and pain. Poetry connects readers to the made and shaped lives of strangers. We encounter their inventions, their hopes, their passions. Not only is erotic poetry erotic, but so is all poetry erotic, whatever its supposed subject, intent, or device. It is a truism that poetic language is itself intrinsically erotic. “It is nothing new,” as Anne Carson writes, “to say that all utterance is erotic in some sense, that all language shows the structure of desire at some level.” Contact: we write when we need it, or when we lack it, when we are driven to speak. We intend to supply a missing thing—a body, a notion, an agreement, a delight. Words represent the material, tactile world, words help us find our way into imagined spaces, words are a conduit from a writer to a reader.
    In the French troubadour poetic tradition, longing for the absent beloved provides the energy and momentum for hundreds of poems. Longing, always longing. The lovers never meet. Something (a husband, an ocean, a class divide) comes between them. Language sustains the romance. These components (lover, beloved, and what comes between them, in Anne Carson’s formulation) derive from ancient poetry about eros, and were later developed and perfected by poets of the courtly love tradition. Such poetry assumes that attraction may only be sustained by placing obstacles between the lovers. The gap of longing must not be breached, the lovers must not meet. The common elements include the perpetually absent beloved, joy intermingled with anguish, and yearning as the governing state of mind. The ingredients are affecting in combination but limited in their forward motion. They prohibit consummation. The key emotional component of this poetics is thus erotic frustration. There’s a difference between poems of longing or of seduction (as in the carpe diem tradition) and poems of contact, presence, or beholding. When nothing comes between the lover and the beloved, we enter another realm of erotic poetry. It’s in their kiss.

How do poets kiss?

The early Greeks spoke of two souls mingling in a kiss. Roman grammarians categorized kisses into types: friendly kisses (oscula), loving kisses (basia), and passionate kisses (suavia). I am concerned not with oscula or basia, but with suavia, passionate kisses. For if poems want to hold off the moment of satisfaction or make a game of sexual persuasion, poems of contact seek to enact and replay the kiss itself. A kiss is an intimate greeting. When I kiss you, all my senses are in play; I taste and I touch, my skin encounters yours in an intimate, tactile exchange; I smell your skin, your hair, sense your excitement, hear the sounds you make, how you breathe. If I open my eyes, I see you, kissing me. We couldn’t get much closer. That expression of contact in poetry is, for Wyatt, “no dream, I lay broad waking”; and similarly other poets of erotic verse seek to replicate and savor these intense sensory qualities.
    Not only poets try to understand the mysteries of kissing. The motives for passionate kisses bewilder and bother Sigmund Freud, who writes: “A particular contact between the mucous membranes of the lips of two people concerned [is] held in high sexual esteem among many nations in spite of the fact that parts if the body involved do not form part of the sexual apparatus but constitute the entrance to the digestive tract.” Later, he notes that kissing is a version of the sexual act itself, both a prelude and an imitation. For Freud, an inescapable truth: kissing is a strange thing to do. E.E. Cummings recognizes that the first kiss is an encounter between strangers, lovers new to each other, and along with pleasure comes physical awkwardness. He describes

    a thing most new complete fragile intense,
    which wholly trembling memory undertakes
    —your kiss,the little pushings of flesh…

The narrator doesn’t want this odd and pleasing experience to stop, and so the poem, made of a single extended sentence, unfolds in leisure, and even the landscape around them brightens with the power of the kiss. In the time it takes for the sentence to play out, we see how kissing alters perception, alters grammar, alters, even, the world. For when the second dash appears (after five intervening lines) to join the parts of Cumming’s sonnet, we behold a changed world, a new space created by the breaching of the gap between them:

    —to feel how through the stopped entire day
    horribly and seriously thrills
    the moment of enthusiastic space
    is a little wonderful,and say
    Perhaps her body touched me;and to face

    suddenly the lighted living hills

This turning point takes place at the volta of the sonnet, showing us how contact itself is a turning point. A good kiss, in a poem, has transformative power.
    We read and write for contact; thus poetry seeks an audience, recipients who can be conceived to take our breath and touch for their very own. Poetry is a body. We speak of the basic element of poetic language as, rightly, a figure of speech. “The figure,” Roland Barthes avers, “is the lover at work.” The depiction of a kiss in a poem creates private space, face to face, in what Susan Stewart calls “the moment of beholding.” But we guard our personal space in order to feel safe against incursions. A kiss is an intrusion, paradoxically making us feel both alive and endangered. Breaking the boundaries, the invisible bubble that surrounds each one of us, can imperil our sense of integrity. When we kiss, we open ourselves to another, and in turn enter into another body. So kisses nourish and feed even as they frighten by their strangeness.  

From Radiant Lyre: Essays on Lyric Poetry, edited by Ann Townsend and David Baker. Copyright 2007 by Graywolf Press. All rights reserved.