Just five minutes ago I came to the realization that I’ve written about penises and butts in this column, but not vaginas or breasts, which hardly seems fair.
One of the many great vagina poems that comes to mind is Franny Choi’s “Pussy Monster,” which you can find in her 2014 collection, Floating, Brilliant, Gone, available at local bookstores.
A few notes:
• As Choi mentions in the Button Poetry video, the poem, which was first published in PANK, is a remix of a Lil’ Wayne song called “Pussy Monster.” She’s taken his lyrics and rearranged them in order of their frequency, saving the word with the highest number of uses for the end.
• Though lyrical and narrative styles of poetry rely on their forms to produce meaning, this sort of poetry lays bare its underlying structure and frees up more possibilities of meaning-making. Poets can read this poem like a sheet of music, changing their tones to stress certain possible meanings over others or to highlight certain moments of coherence. Read solemnly, I could see the first line, in conversation with the title, offering a monster pussy as a sort of remedy for starved desire: “for flu food bowl stood no more soup remove spoon drink juice salt pepper…” But read quickly, I can only hear it as a sort of strange recipe.
• The character in Lil Wayne’s song is a somewhat womanizing “pussy monster” who must go down on people with pussies in order to survive. Rather than simply excoriating the rapper for perpetuating the patriarchy in pop culture by reducing the women in the song to their genitals and speaking of them as if they were merely items on a buffet, in the end Choi indicts all of us as “monsters,” or as participants in the patriarchy, by piling up the pronouns: “me me me me me me me me me…. you you you you you you you you you I I I I I I I I I I I I I I I…” etc. Though I could also see this as a way of reframing the lyrics as a pure femme anthem, with the repetition of “pussy” asserting the dominance of the pussy in a world of lesser letters. What do you see?
