Annotation

Hayd Carruth, 'The woman's genitals'

The poem evokes the trope of the female as all-encompassing, omnivorous, mysterious. Some may be offended, not so much by the subject matter, as by the epitomization of the woman's genitals as ‘worldbody' and as a kind of living entity that presses/clings/takes/repulses/reviles/abuses. There may be a sense of irritation that the genitals stand for everything (hence the ‘extraordinary allusiveness') like the godhead, thus objectifying the female by making her genitalia a kind of religious source, rather than personalizing and individualizing a particular woman. In that sense, one could argue that in spite of the florid, metaphorical language, the poem achieves no greater sense of empathic subjectivity than the anatomical text. Nonetheless, the language of the poem is rich and evocative: it renders the body in aesthetic and temporal terms, linking the body to nature and to the generative aspect of time—how it has ‘become become become,' and ‘how it is here and how it was always here.' Most importantly, the poem encompasses the speaker/narrator as an essential component of what is spoken: it evokes the meanings the body has for the speaker, meanings that are suppressed in the ordinary clinical encounter.