Episode 40 - THE SOUL OF SEXUAL POETRY with Wendy Maltz
THE SOUL OF SEXUAL POETRY with Wendy Maltz, LCSW, DST author of "Intimate Kisses: The Poetry of Sexual Pleasure, "Passionate Hearts: The Poetry of Sexual Love," and "Private Thoughts: Exploring Women's Sexual Fantasies." She has been married for over 35 years.
In this episode, Wendy invites us into the igniting contagion of erotic poetry. Explore how juicy, dripping, heart shattering, gripping poetry can become a portal to new realms in sexuality. Learn how to entice your partner while sharing a delicious dance of erotic words. Unleash inner passion and appreciation of the body of your lover. Reveal images of multi-layered healthy sexuality. Tune in to touch in as if experiencing a banquet of the senses.
Transcript
Transcript
Francesca Gentille: Welcome to Sex, Tantra and Kama Sutra: Bringing You the Soul of Sex. With me today is Wendy Maltz. Wendy is a sex therapist and a fairly prolific author of delicious books that we’re going to be going into today. One is called Intimate Kisses: The Poetry of Sexual Pleasure. Another is called Passionate Hearts: The Poetry of Sexual Love. She’s also the author of The Sexual Healing Journey, which is a seminal book in, for people who are surviving sexual abuse and for a therapist.
Wendy Maltz: This is very healing for me because of hearing a lot of stories of sexual abuse, I just found exposing myself to this poetry was just marvelous. This is celebrating our bodies, celebrating our sexuality, being open but doing it in a way that is respectful our ourselves and encourages connection with another person.
Wendy Maltz: What makes it good isn’t the mystery or masterly technique or even a love so strong you can smash bricks with it. It’s this thin waters way I feel when you grab me by the eyes and slip your slip your thin black panty’s off.
Wendy Maltz: When you’re making love, to sort of say, “What is this like? What element am I in? Am I floating? Am I swimming? Am I burning up in flames? Am I like a breeze?” What images. Give yourself permission to just jot down a few words or say out loud. You don’t have to be a great poet, you don’t ever have to publish, but just to be able to be aware, bring into your own consciousness how your sexual experiences are moving you and being able to see if you can find words that reflect that.
Francesca Gentille: Welcome to Sex, Tantra and Kama Sutra: Brining You the Soul of Sex. With me today is Wendy Maltz. Wendy is a sex therapist and a fairly prolific author of delicious books that we’re going to be going into today. One is called Intimate Kisses: The Poetry of Sexual Pleasure. Another is called Passionate Hearts: The Poetry of Sexual Love. She’s also the author of The Sexual Healing Journey, which is a seminal book in, for people who are surviving sexual abuse and for a therapist. She’s been married 30 years to her beloved, they’ll be celebrating their anniversary this summer, and I just am so delighted to have her here with us. Welcome Wendy.
Wendy Maltz: Well happy to be here.
Francesca Gentille: Now Wendy, I was so excited to have you on the show and to introduce you to our listening audience because of that, what you bring forward that is still fairly sadly rare in our culture, the, I’m just going to quote you, “Sex within a context of real love can, commitment and safety is expansive and deeply pleasurable”, and that these poems really bring that forward in a new way for people. Could you say a little bit about how you discovered that and why you even went on this journey to create these goals.
Wendy Maltz: Yeah, well, you know, I work a lot with survivors of sexual abuse and people who are suffering from sexual addictions and compulsion, and a lot of times my clients would say things like, “Well where can we get examples of healthy sexual intimacy? We need things to inspire us, to get our juices flowing and, you know, don’t want to turn to pornography and don’t want to turn to imagery or words that are alienating and take us far apart from each other. We want things that bring us closer”. So I went on this quest to find, I looked at lots of different things, and where I found the answer to what I was looking for was in poetry, and it was really fun just reading old poems, encouraging people to send me poems, asking poets who knew other poets for poems, and I was amazed with what I got because they were just such delightful and inspiring and hot and body moving kinds of poems.
Francesca Gentille: Could you give us a, one of your favorite little samples, a little taste, a little tidbit?
Wendy Maltz: Well one of my favorites is a poem by Marge Piercy called Morning Love Song, and I’ll read the first and last stance on that ‘cause it’s so neat just to hear how this woman was talking about how her body felt when she got sexually excited. “I am filled with love”, and when she was thinking about her lover, it’s called Morning Love Song, “I am filled with love like a melon. With seeds I am ripe and dripping sweet juices. If you knock gently on my belly it will thrum ripe, ripe”, and then it ends with a stanza, “I am trying to work and instead I drip love for you like a honeycomb. I am devoid of fantasies, clean as rain water, waiting to flow all over your skin.”
Francesca Gentille: Wow.
Wendy Maltz: You can almost eat that poem.
Francesca Gentille: Yeah, you could. And how was it for you, or is this something that you were able to bring into your life and deepen, you know, your life as you did this?
Wendy Maltz: Oh yeah, this is very healing for me because of hearing a lot of stories of sexual abuse and being a survivor myself and just always on a quest to learn what I can about positive sexuality, I just found exposing myself to this poetry was just marvelous. This is the other end of the spectrum, this is the side of the spectrum where our bodies, this is celebrating our bodies, celebrating our sexuality, being open, but doing it a way, in a way that is respectful of ourselves and that encourages connection with another person.
Francesca Gentille: I mean, you know, Wendy I want to thank you so much for doing this work and gathering these poems. It, because of that spectrum that we’re talking about, it’s one end of the spectrum is that sexual abuse, and I say that we can even sexually abuse ourselves, you know, that when we’re disconnected from our heart, disconnected from, you know, our spirit, and just, you know, you know, out of the sense of, really a disconnect, a disconnect with anything but maybe the most primal kind of horniness, and, and there’s a way to be primal I think that is also sacred and I think some of these poem also, you know, touch on that, and there’s a way that we can be very disconnected or disassociated. And what you bring forward is the other end of the spectrum where we’re heart, body, mind, spirit all in one and become so, so rich and so delicious and satisfied.
Wendy Maltz: It’s a connection with our own bodies, it’s a connection with our partners bodies, and it’s a connection with natural forces in the universe. Like the different elements, like here’s a poem, excuse me, I’ll read some of this poem from Karen Karison, I love this poem. It doesn’t have a title, but it starts, it, she’s talking about the earth element and how she just relates to that when they’re making love, and there’s this just way of sort of, you know, we talk about getting down and dirty, well this poem is sort of about that, but in a very positive way. So she says, “I love being lost in the sound that mud makes when it is soft and wet and begs your fingers to stay a little while longer, and please play some more in my earth. Smell this beautiful terafirma consuming you, begging you to forsake the skillful architecture of your hands to make a more marvelous mess, and I love you saying, ‘Look baby, I have found this branch of myself that I can use to dig your sweet red clay to death’ and I say ‘Yes, dig me baby. Dig me as if planting love like croakeses beneath the window of my hips.”
Francesca Gentille: Wow.
Wendy Maltz: Isn’t that fun?
Francesca Gentille: That is delicious, and it reminds me of the ancient love poetry of Anan and Demovie, which I think is three thousand years old, it’s one of the oldest forms of writing, if not the oldest form of writing, was that love poem where the goddess Anana says, “Who will plow my vulva? Who will fill my boat with cream?” And somehow we lost that, we lost that over thousands of years, that sense of embracing the sacred body, and…
Wendy Maltz: Yeah.
Francesca Gentille: the way that the masculine and the feminine are meant to dance with and fertilize and heal and enliven one another.
Wendy Maltz: Yeah, so much. Wonderful, yeah.
Francesca Gentille: And I want to talk more about that when we come back from a break and how, maybe if you would share some stories from your practice, how you, how this has transformed people’s lives and how people can use this at home in the bedroom to really bring that richness and that deepness that we’re really are longing for back into our lives. And we’ll be back with Wendy after a break and word from our fabulous sponsors, and a reminder, please support our sponsors, as you support them you keep programs like this out in the world. And we’ll be right back.
Francesca Gentille: Welcome back to Sex, Tantra and Kama Sutra: Brining You the Soul of Sex with Wendy Maltz, sex therapist, author of these fabulous books, Intimate Kisses and also Passionate Hearts, and I was paging through the book during the break and every single page is so, so tantalizing and I can hardly wait to, to share this with my beloved, and do you have a story that you could share with us, a favorite story of how this has been used in your practice or how you know it’s been used with a couple?
Wendy Maltz: Well there are, you know, quite a few with sexual addiction problems and her were sexually abused who turned to these poetry collections to, to find out what sexual, what positive sexuality was all about, and took them home and read them. I worked once with a man who was leaving the priesthood and he was entering into, just starting to date and had been a virgin, kind of like The 40 Year Old Virgin, you know…
Francesca Gentille: Mm hmm.
Wendy Maltz: and he really wanted to learn about sexuality in a positive way, so he read these poetry books and would come back and discuss aspects of sexuality and he just loved it, it was like, he just thought it was such a positive way of approaching sexuality. And there was a couple that I worked with that what they did for marital improvement was to read a, some different passages from marriage enrichment books, and the wife came home, you know, or went to bed one night with the husband, said, “Well tonight we’re, I’m going to read you some poetry”, and he groaned, “Oh god, poetry”, you know, and he was one of these young men who would skip that day in English class when the poetry came up and, but he laid there and he closed his eyes and she started reading him these poems, you know, things like the Ninth Secret Poem from Apollinaire, that starts, “I worship your fleece which is the perfect triangle of the goddess. I am the lumberjack of the only virgin forest. Oh my El Dorado. I am the only fish in your voluptuous ocean, you my lovely siren. I am the climber on your snowy mountain. Oh my whitest alp”, and it goes on like that. And he started raising an eyebrow and then raising another eyebrow and he goes, “I think I like this poetry. I could get into poetry. And so, I guess it could be used in introductory poetry classes for some people. They would probably have a lot of fewer people skipping the classes those days.
Francesca Gentille: It’s such a wonderful, I think what you bring up with the couple is that there are many ways to express love, there’s the visual, there’s the sense of touch, but there’s also the aural, the actual ear…
Wendy Maltz: Yeah.
Francesca Gentille: the wooing our beloved through the ear. Some of us love to hear the sounds of love, the, you know, the breath and the sighs and the moans, and there’s something that’s evoked, I’m looking here and it says, “I speak along the arc of your breast through the cadence of your ribs over the plain of your belly and the warm rain between your thighs and into you. My tongue speaks to your sex, your perfect woman’s body reads my body, draws my silent words into you”. It’s so, there’s something that opens in us, something’s evoked and it’s that union of that, once again, the heart and the mind and the body and the spirit versus the disconnection. I know that one of the books you are just about to finish and release is The Porn Trap, which is that the concept of the disconnection, and I spent some time, I don’t know, I’m guessing you did as well, looking for visual erotic art and visual films that I felt were once again integrative and that my soul and my vulva could sing to when I watched them versus feeling that I was disconnecting in some way from my heart or my spirit, in being aroused. I mean there’s a terrible after taste I find with that, when I literally am aroused because that’s primal, because it’s just there to be aroused at, you know, pictures of, you know, dicks and cunts and vulvas and, you know, falluces and lingums, is that that’s just hard wired into my brain, but if the rest of me is not along for the ride, it feels bad later.
Wendy Maltz: Yes. Like here’s a poem by David Mule and he, it’s called What Makes It Good, it’s a short little poem, but he is, you know, we could say, “Well he’s a sexually objectifying partner”, yes, but in a very loving, warm and even slightly humorous way. So he says, “What makes it good? Is it the mystery or masterly technique or even a love so strong you can smash bricks with it. It’s the thinning waters way I feel when you grab me by the eyes and slip your thin black panty’s off.” You can just see his, you know, his lover doing this wonderful striptease for him. But you know what is also in there, the line “when you grab me by the eyes”…
Francesca Gentille: Yeah.
Wendy Maltz: is, that reflects something that shows up in poetry called ‘sinisthesia’, and it’s a blending of senses. So you can, you can grab with eyes or you can see with your tongue, things like this, and this blending of senses is something that goes on in peak moments of sexual ecstasy. I’m, you know, so we can, we often experience that in lovemaking where it all just seems to merge, we’re floating, we’re burning up, we’re rising, we’re touching with our hearts…
Francesca Gentille: Mm hmm.
Wendy Maltz: We’re touching with our, with our words, and we, our bodies expand in their ability to make contact and to experience our present realities.
Francesca Gentille: So that, what I hear in that is that same merging that we speak of in tantra or that we speak of in Daoism, that same merging that we get to, in the breast, in the eye gazing, that poetry itself can be another portal, another pathway or practice into that merging…
Wendy Maltz: Yes.
Francesca Gentille: that expansive sexuality that people listening to this show want.
Wendy Maltz: Yeah, it expands our own awareness of our own bodies and what it’s like to be in our bodies and experience things, and then it expands our appreciation for our lover. Like here’s two poems and you can, they contrast the, their hands touching bodies, but the first one from Octavio Paz, which is translated from the Spanish by Charles Tomlinson, it’s called Touch, and these are short little poems. He says, “My hands open the curtains of your being, cloth you in a further nudity, uncover the bodies of your body. My hands invent another body for your body.” So he’s, he’s just aware of his, he’s discovering how the kind of impact he can have on his lover. And then contrast that with Nikki Giovani’s little poem The Butterfly, and she’s a wonderful black poet and she, the poem goes, “Those things, which you so laughingly call hands, are in fact two brown butterfly’s fluttering across the pleasure they give my body.” So for her the awareness of being touched and how that, how that changes her feeling about her lover and, it’s more focused on the appreciation of the lovers body as she’s being touched. You know, when we touch we also are, as we touch we are being touched, you can’t like separate the two, you know, but you can’t kind of tune into each aspect in that makes touch experience that much fuller because it has this kind of yin and yang to it.
Francesca Gentille: I think, you know, I just want to breathe that in for a moment, that’s brilliant, and invite our listening audience to focus on that teaching that you just gave, which is that when we’re touching someone we’re also being touched, as we run our hands over their bodies, their body is touching us, and when we are the receiver, when we are being touched, our skin is also touching the person that is caressing us and that we literally through our attention can tune in, even though I’m receiving, how am I touching the hand as it goes, it’s trippy, I’ve done this before, it’s trippy when we feel more into one versus the other, how am I receiving the touch versus how am I actually sending the touch out, and even if I’m the toucher how am I receiving being touched by my caress. Oh, I’m so glad you brought that up, I just completely forgot about that.
Wendy Maltz: Yeah.
Francesca Gentille: And you know what I’m discovering as you read these poems is they’re like doors opening, they’re like pictures in my mind, in my spirit that as I read something, I say, “What if I did that? What if I tried that?” It’s something that wasn’t present in my mind and in my heart before I read these poems shows up. They’re like an invocation.
Wendy Maltz: And, you know, like we’re, we think in terms of making love to a partner, we might think of their genitals, their penises, their nipples, their vulvas, and, but, you know, take for instance how you can go even deeper and just take it into another dimension, like in this poem from Roger Fingston called Bones, he says, “Today dear one, I attempt the impossible. I’m going to love your bones. I mean love your bones so they will know that they’ve been loved, so your flesh will simmer with jealousy, melt and merge with your bones, be one with your bones and know how cold your bodies have been without love. Are you ready? Can we do this?” And I just love that, it’s like to, you know, tonight when you make love with your partner, think of loving your partners bones.
Francesca Gentille: I love that. We’re, you know, we’re…
Wendy Maltz: Or cartilage or, you know, organs or whatever, you know. But we can take this, we can really love in dimensions we hadn’t even been aware of.
Francesca Gentille: That is an incredible concept that is once again these words bring forward, invoke or evoke in us this sense of moving into different realms, different realms of being. I love that, where you love, you can love someone both through their organs, and that brings us into that sexual healing, you know, that sacred sexual healing, that, back into the Daoists again where our, literally our energy follows our attention and our intention. So as we’re shifting our perspectives, we’re in new worlds here sexually.
Wendy Maltz: We’re in new worlds and it’s so important, when you explore these realms, you see how very limited our cultural models for sexuality are, how, you know, like pornography is just such a really narrow span, if it was on a radio spectrum would just have a few little stations in it, you know. Sex is infinite, and our ability to connect and transform and transcend our experience and move it into new realms, it’s just unlimited in our ability to do that.
Francesca Gentille: Lets talk a little bit more about how we do that and the different ways we can do that after we come back from a break and a word from our fabulous sponsors.
Francesca Gentille: Welcome back to Sex, Tantra and Kama Sutra: Bringing You the Soul of Sex with our delectable Wendy Maltz, sex therapist and author extraordinaire, a collector of these amazing books of erotic poetry, of heart, body, mind and soul. And Wendy I wanted to ask you, for those of us who, you know, might want to start writing or, you know, bring this more personally into our life with our beloved, what are some ways that we could do that?
Wendy Maltz: You know, this has to, it has to do with the awareness and consciousness, and to be able to give yourself permission to ask like, what is, when you’re making love to sort of say, “What is this like? What element am I in? Am I floating? Am I swimming? Am I, am I burning up in flames? Am I, you know, am I like a breeze? Am I, you know, am I like the mud or whatever and, you know, having a stick digging in me? What is this like, you know? What images come to mind?” And then give yourself permission to just jot down a few words or say out loud, and you can, you don’t have to be a great poet, you don’t ever have to publish, but just to be able to be aware, bring into your own consciousness, how your sexual experiences are moving you and being able to see if you can find words that reflect that and tune you in more to that positive consciousness, it’s not a self-consciousness, it’s an expansive consciousness of what you’re experiencing. Sometimes when we are making love and we’re in the throws of ecstasy, in the throws of an orgasm, you just might automatically shout out something that even surprises you, like, you know, “Oh, I could just”, or lets see, “Pull me in deeper”, something like that or, “Baby you’re the best”, you know, and you can make a poem about that. “Baby you’re the best, baby you’re the one”, you know, and you can just allow yourself to use the words and the images that bubble up for you naturally to create your own poetry.
Francesca Gentille: And I think that’s a great gift of reverie when, like you said, after you make life, after beautiful post coital napping, you know, to maybe take a walk in the garden or, and write down, “What was that? How does that feel in my body?” I, one of the institutes that I teach at, we’ll talk about, they call it ‘anchoring’, where they will ask, when they’re teaching the class they’ll ask, “Now say to your partner, what is this like in my body? My body feels that there’s a burning that goes from my vulva up to my heart and then it feels like there’s an ocean and tides in my heart when I look at you”, and they really invite people to practice this combination of this sensae anchoring of experience into words and spirit and something expands, and it gets more, in a sense, more real, more precious, more moving when we do that. And I, you know, sometimes in the throws right before orgasm, I’m not necessarily going to talk a lot, but I find that in the early moments of my lovemaking when I’ve lit the candles and put on music and just really tuning into my beloved, looking at him and letting my eyes rove across his body and thinking how precious he is to me, I might say, you know, “You are, your body is marble glimmering in the candlelight. You are”, and I literally will give him poetry while we’re in the bedroom, and it’s, I can see him expand, I mean, his fallace might expand as well, and, but his, it’s almost like his breath expands, his soul expands in his body as he’s being worshipped, worshipped and adored. And I, I read that in these poetries. It’s just a worship and an adoration of sexuality and the portal that sexuality is into, I would say, an embodied soul experience.
Wendy Maltz: There, I actually did write a few poems under the sudonym Wendy Lee…
Francesca Gentille: Did you?
Wendy Maltz: sections, and one of them is Seamless Beauty and it came from a wonderful experience I had with my husband and I saw the, sort of the yin and yang, a bitter, the sense of holding on and letting go that goes on in sex, and it starts, “Bitter sweet, just lying under you, your nose buried in my neck, can’t get enough of your scent, you mumble and fall asleep”, and then it goes on and it kind of ends with, “Someday I’d like to die this way, with you still inside me, fall into a deep sleep and never wake up, never have to know the parting, the spent waves leaving the shore. Your hair hugs my finger and falls away. Each twirl brings you closer, yet farther from me. The holding on becomes the letting go.” So it’s, I mean, you know, it sounds like it might be a little sad, but to me it was just sheer beauty, it’s called Seamless Beauty, it’s the seamlessness of the yin and yang, the loss that’s in the connection and the connection that’s in the loss, you know.
Francesca Gentille: I thought it was gorgeous. I’m impressed, not only are you a gatherer of poems, a sex therapist, someone who brings sexual healing to people, but a gorgeous poet, you know, inbued with a divine yourself.
Wendy Maltz: Well this, you know, I’ve written like about four poems in my whole life, but it just came I think from reading so much of this poetry. You just start, I just, it can turn you into a poet, it’s contagious.
Francesca Gentille: I love that, and may we, may we all turn into erotic poets of love, experience that, experience that celebration of life and sex in the body.
Wendy Maltz: Yeah.
Francesca Gentille: And I just want to thank you so much Wendy for joining us today and brining this into the world, bringing something that’s been missing in the world for a really long time, this sacredness, this deliciousness, this juiciness of sexuality and pleasure, and how do people reach you, how can they find you?
Wendy Maltz: Well, healthysex.com is my website and there’s lots of information on there all about what healthy sexuality is. There’s poetry on there, and there’s information about all the books and videos, DVD’s I’ve done and there’s a lot of free stuff. It’s at healthysex.com, it’s an education site that in a, many ways and you’ll find some really neat articles and checklists and things to help you creative positive healthy sexuality.
Francesca Gentille: Thank you Wendy for being this, the goddess of healthy sexuality in the world.
Wendy Maltz: My pleasure. Thank you for having me here Francesca.
Francesca Gentille: And thank you our listening audience for being on this journey with us into the soul of sex, and if you would like more, to read the transcripts, to connect with Wendy, to even leave her a message, you can do that at www.personallifemedia.com. That’s www.personallifemedia.com.