A suitable Term: Van Roberts discusses sex poetry, erotica and pornography

Van Roberts

Melbourne has a poet whose work is sometimes dismissed as ‘disgusting and smutty’: the sex Ben John Smith writes about happens with himself, happens in a puddle of red wine or doesn’t happen at all. Yet his work is frequently called pornographic. Ben’s writing may not arouse the reader but he writes truthfully about sex. He calls all the body parts by their (sometimes colourful) names and writes about the urges we would rather not admit to. In his poem ‘I’m a World Famous Poet’:

a girl with the prettiest brown curls you ever saw calls me ‘the poet’
and asks to f**k the both of us in an orgy I couldn’t handle anyway
I say, ‘You hear that, baby? They called me a poet.’

Good (sex) writing isn’t completely show or tell; it lets the reader’s imagination join the dots while also being clear and succinct. I’ve seen a lot of sex writing. Some pieces are so loaded in metaphor it’s hard to know who’s doing what to whom. Other works are filled with ‘Ikea sex’ that’s just ‘insert tab a into tab b.’ This type of writing sells—just look at the-book-that-shall-not-be-named—but, as Agatha Christie once said, ‘there is nothing more dull than dull pornography.’ Writers, myself included, struggle to find the middle ground between the explicit and the implied.

http://www.australianpoetry.org/2013/06/26/a-suitable-term-van-roberts-discusses-sex-poetry-erotica-and-pornography/