Frogpond 34.3 • Autumn 2011 (pdf) - Haiku Society of America

monastery in Aylmer, Quebec. After a few minutes, a husband
grabbed his poet wife by the elbow and left in a huff. Afterwards,
the general audience response was unfavorable.
Since then he has published his sex haiku in various places.
The 200+ haiku in this collection seem to be the collected
works. Readers are likely to react in the same way as the Aylmer
audience. And, if the content isn’t a turnoff, the booklet
itself will be. Poorly stapled, unevenly cut, it certainly doesn’t
justify the price tag. The sloppy production is a surprise given
the good reputation of Hryciuk’s publishing house, Nietzsche’s
Brolly.
Hryciuk is an adventurous, taboo-breaking kind of poet. So,
this collection is not surprising. What does bewilder, however,
is the unimaginative language—the kind you expect a porn
director to use with his hustlers-turned-actors: hugging me under
the arms / hard as you can / as i can fuck you. What gives?
Hryciuk is a fine poet, first and foremost. Why has he published
poems many of which read like a crass sex manual? Of
course, he could argue that during sex one shouldn’t think of
anything else, but the immediate details. Perhaps his agenda is
to strip to their bare, verbal minimum all the acts he describes,
both gay and straight—fellatio, cunnilingus, anal and vaginal
penetration, masturbation, urination—in order to allow the
reader to fill-in the love, the romance, the fantasy. Maybe he
had Dadaism in mind, e.g., the Duchamp toilet as art.
Nevertheless, every so often, certain pieces in the collection
have juxtapositions that generate feelings beyond the words
on the page and remind us of Hryciuk, the poet: fucked on the
beach / our imprint / the waves through it; after / i dream i’m
holding / my baby boy.
Likely, one of Hryciuk’s goals is to instigate change. After all,
most haiku poets seem averse to writing about sex and Hryciuk
is sending out a wake-up call akin to what Allen Ginsburg
did in the last half of the 20th century. Then again, readers
might want to re-discover Erotic Haiku, edited by Rod Willmot
(Black Moss Press, 1983), the perfect antidote to Zenosex.
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