The Poetics of Sex in ‘The Bare Thing’ by Len Lukowski (Broken Sleep Books, 2022), Reviewed and Interviewed by JP Seabright

The body as ritual. As craft. Language. Laid bare. 

In The Bare Thing, Len Lukowski lays both bodies and language bare, with all their shared subversive sexualities. Language, like bodies, has a longing and desire to be seen and heard. We write with, on and through our bodies. When our bodies change, for whatever reason, our experience of the world, and articulation of that experience, changes also. Sometimes we need to create a whole new language for this rebirth. 

In his debut pamphlet, Lukowski has crafted his own poetics to define and describe the physical and emotional transitions his body has gone through. Does this make the language inherently queer? Perhaps. Language can be bent into any shape we like, and in the opinion of this reviewer, this (f)act should be celebrated, rather than trying to nail fixed definitions to concepts as fluid as gender and genre to a semantic cross. This is a new poetics of sex. 

In ‘Need’ Lukowski articulates a raw lust for otherness and for obliteration. Sometimes this is found in sameness, and in revelation:

necesito ache drool slobber spit on knees begging step through the screen to touch the things inside…

…brutally longing wanting to reach in and reclaim the things you lost

In ‘Table’, it is the utter simplicity of the language that confronts us, stripped back and opened up, like the anaesthetized patient laid out in the poem:

The calmest I ever felt

I was sedated 

upon the 

surgeon’s table

Those are the conditions

under which you can

really let go

What could be more intimate

than a body breathing

without shame

There is a journey of sorts through The Bare Thing, one of discovery, as the reader peers over the shoulder of the poet on their own journey of uncovering. Exploring fear/lust, despair/ecstasy, submission/control - this is not a conventional narrative. The pamphlet plays with a mix of styles: ‘traditional’ poems, prose poems, as well as found and erased texts, such as t:

Malignant aversion has recently had an extraordinary opportunity

a crisis over the entire framing of knowledge about the human body

bodies that we carry within us

it is perhaps necessary to accept the pain of embracing

Pain and pleasure are represented on the pages here in equal measure, within the act of sex, and in the acts we conduct upon our own bodies. Humour too, is played well, handling topics as candid as cockblock, the unbearable sadness of an unused discarded dildo, and dreams of Julia Roberts, Hollyoaks and of strolling to my death while you danced to the Pet Shop Boys. But amongst the humour and Grindr hook-ups, there is a depth and clarity to these poems, particularly in addressing public perceptions of others’ bodies.

In ‘Testosterone 2 (After Rilke)’:

Once you have inhabited it from every angle

you cannot know the absurdity

of classifying the body with a hasty

glance towards the face or groin.

Shatter the borders of who you are.

it’s always changing –

Bold. Brutal in places, yet unafraid to voice masculine vulnerability, Lukowski’s poems catch breath and take flight. But not always where you might expect them to. 

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I was fortunate to have the opportunity to ask Len directly about his creative practice. 

JP: Several of the poems in your pamphlet are quite experimental in form (it looks like there’s some erasure/found poetry in there too). Do you craft form to fit the subject or vice versa, or is it not a conscious/premeditated process?

LL: I definitely don't craft poems to fit a particular form; usually when I first begin a poem it's a case of getting a few lines in my head then trying to work out which form serves them best, by messing about and experimenting. In terms of the found poems, the poem 't' is an erasure of the introduction to a 1983 essay called 'Is the Rectum A Grave' by Leo Bersani. The whole essay is really interesting and thought-provoking around the 'sex wars' of the ‘80s and ‘90s and relating them to the AIDS pandemic and the media representation of it and sex (especially between gay men) at the time. The part of the essay I used for the poem was actually just the introduction, where Bersani is setting the scene around the media and political backlash against gay people, particularly gay men, in 1983. I hadn't intended to do anything with the text but when I read the descriptions of how queers were being depicted in the media and by politicians it reminded me so much of the current anti-trans backlash, so many of those sentences could have been from now, so that's what I wanted to highlight in the poem. This is not to say trans people were having a great time in 1983 but I guess more visibility has bred more fear and hatred. On a lighter note, 'Smiling Devil' is also sort of a found poem. I was messing about with various Grindr message refrains and made them into a poem.

JP: Many of these poems directly address sex and sexuality (as well as gender and transitioning). The reader will invariably assume the ‘I’ of the poem is the poet themselves. What’s your own perspective on that – is that something you encourage, are comfortable with, or ambivalent about?

LL: On principle I don't think people should automatically assume a poem using 'I' equals the poet, that's quite limiting. But readers often will and there's nothing we can do about it! In the case of The Bare Thing I don't particularly mind as most of the collection has quite a lot to do with my own experience. That said, even if you write something 100% autobiographical, it can only ever be a snapshot of one particular moment in time, everyone understands things differently and there are limits to memory. I guess don't mind ambivalence. 

JP: It feels as though we’re currently going through a renaissance of queer and trans poetry in the UK. Is this something that you feel a part of, or is it still hard to get certain subjects and viewpoints heard? 

LL: I'm happy to exist in a time of so many excellent queer poets! It's hard to answer the question about certain subjects being 'off-limits' because being rejected as a writer is so normal that it's hard to know whether something is rejected because a topic is considered off limits or because rejection is the norm. That said, I sometimes think there isn't as much space for queer/trans work that is dark, dirty, horny, ambivalent and messy in the current literary landscape and that is exactly the type of thing I'm drawn to writing about and would love to read more of. I feel that I've seen a rise in journals that won't accept sexually explicit material. Of course I respect the editor's right to publish or not publish whatever they want, but surely sex is a part of life as much as anything else and I've sometimes found it challenging looking for places to submit my work (short stories as much as poetry) because sex is a part of it.

In summoning and celebrating the poetics of sex, I return to the first lines from The Bare Thing, where in ‘Walking To His House’, risk and rough desire meet, the other side of the graveyard:

It’s not you, it’s the blood in you

that flows to the estuaries

where joy and shame meet.