Jim: a wonderful poem. Thanks for posting it. I found this amazing statement by another poet, Michel Leiris. It's from the beginning of "Manhood", one of the frankest of autobiographies and an extraodinary piece of literature.
"I have always suffered disgust for pregnant women, fear of childbirth and frank repugnance toward newborn babies. Such emotions have, I believe, been familiar since my earliest childhood, and I suspect such fairy-tale expressions as "they lived happily ever after and had many children" provoked an early incredulity. My sister gave birth to a daughter when I was about nine; I was literally nauseated by my first glimpse of the child-thee pointed skull, the diapers smeared with excrement, and the umbilical cord that made me exclaim: "She's throwing up out he stomach!" (...) As an adult, I have never been able to endure the idea of having a child, of bringing into the world a being who by definition has not asked for life anb must endure death after having, perhaps, procreated in his turn. It would be impossible for me to perform the sexual act if I felt it to be anything sterile and alient to the human instinc of reproduction".
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Jim: a wonderful poem. Thanks for posting it. I found this amazing statement by another poet, Michel Leiris. It's from the beginning of "Manhood", one of the frankest of autobiographies and an extraodinary piece of literature.
"I have always suffered disgust for pregnant women, fear of childbirth and frank repugnance toward newborn babies. Such emotions have, I believe, been familiar since my earliest childhood, and I suspect such fairy-tale expressions as "they lived happily ever after and had many children" provoked an early incredulity.
My sister gave birth to a daughter when I was about nine; I was literally nauseated by my first glimpse of the child-thee pointed skull, the diapers smeared with excrement, and the umbilical cord that made me exclaim: "She's throwing up out he stomach!" (...)
As an adult, I have never been able to endure the idea of having a child, of bringing into the world a being who by definition has not asked for life anb must endure death after having, perhaps, procreated in his turn. It would be impossible for me to perform the sexual act if I felt it to be anything sterile and alient to the human instinc of reproduction".
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