Live Nude Poems

I am intimidated by poetry criticism because I've spent most of my adult life reading fiction and sometimes writing about fiction. As I age, I've been reading much more poetry and much more poetry criticism, which, given my relative lack of experience with the forms, has left me formulating (what seem to me to be) dumb questions, and trying like mad to find answers that make sense. One of the things I've thought about consistently is the role gender and sex play in my reading and in the litworld at large. Nearly all of my favorite poets are women (my favorite fiction writers are almost exclusively male), usually somewhat combative as regards sexual and gender roles, and aggressively intellectual (and is that a complex idea?? that the women I reference would pillory me for as merely another example of sexism?? like, why can't women be aggressive in the same way that men seem so comfortable with without being labelled as shrill or dykey or, well, you get the point? at...

is someone whose poems I admire very much. Part of the attraction seems her complete willingness to try anything to make the work bold and memorable. The poems follow no discernable form, look like average-to-bad free verse on the page--random line breaks, simple language-- it seems to me, and on first read you might find it easier to chuck them than face them straight-on, but that would be a terrible mistake. As Gardner said of Robert Penn Warren, read it again. Her books include The Cow   and Coeur De Lion , and she also translates Baudelaire and Jean-Luc Hennig. Here's one from Everyday Genius . from THE PALACE OF JUSTICE when my boyfriend called the cops on me i waited in my room for them to come i waited a half hour and then another half hour this naked whiteness i could contrive to cleanse me officer i am in love and now my lover hate me always having dreamed of being a monk in a cell if i eat celery for ten days and with an ether commingle i could si...