The Prose Poem as a Sex Toy
Lesson 6 - Writing about sex and the body
Lesson 6 of 8 from Karan Kapoor’s Surrealist's Toolkit: Creating Beautiful Prose Poems from Everyday Madness
Sex was an important tool for the surrealists. As I mentioned in the first lesson, Freud was one of the most prominent figures of the early 20th century and his theories had a massive influence on the Surrealists.
Freud is now famously known as a weird dude, but a lot of artists (mostly male artists) around that time were too impressed by him. The connection between sexuality (especially sexual deviation) and the unconscious that Freud explored in terms of psychology artists did and have done so in their art for a long time, but the surrealists brought it to the forefront.
Look at Salvador Dali’s The Great Masturbator, for instance, or the nudity in Fellini’s films, or how Kundera’s dream scenes in The Unbearable Lightness of Being bring to the forth this connection between the unconscious mind and sexuality.
Let’s look at five poems and see how they explore sexuality
from “Freedom of Love” by Andre Breton
My wife with the hair of a wood fire
With the thoughts of heat lightning
With the waist of an hourglass
With the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger
My wife with the lips of a cockade and of a bunch of stars of the last magnitude
With the teeth of tracks of white mice on the white earth
With the tongue of rubbed amber and glass
My wife with the tongue of a stabbed host
With the tongue of a doll that opens and closes its eyes
With the tongue of an unbelievable stone
My wife with the eyelashes of strokes of a child's writing
…
My wife with a neck of unpearled barley
My wife with a throat of the valley of gold
Of a tryst in the very bed of the torrent
With breasts of night
My wife with breasts of a marine molehill
My wife with breasts of the ruby's crucible
With breasts of the rose's spectre beneath the dew
My wife with the belly of an unfolding of the fan of days
With the belly of a gigantic claw
My wife with the back of a bird fleeing vertically
With a back of quicksilver
With a back of light
Let’s Unpack:
Breton’s “Freedom of Love” exemplifies the surrealist technique of defamiliarizing the familiar that we discussed in the very first lesson.
By using a series of unexpected, often startling metaphors to describe his wife, Breton transforms ordinary physical features into extraordinary images. This method not only highlights the beauty of the loved one but also reflects the complex, multifaceted nature of human attraction and intimacy.
The surrealist juxtaposition of elements like “the waist of an otter in the teeth of a tiger” illustrates the unpredictable and wild nature of love, capturing its essence in a way that transcends conventional description. Mind you, this is likely happening because of unbridled automatic writing, as it’s made clear by some of the insane images as well sentence structure. Breton has really tapped into his unconscious here. You do not need to excuse him for his misogyny. It was a big characteristic of the surrealists at the time.